Polish Voice Assimilation

at the Phonetics-Phonology

Interface

Karolina BrośUniversity of Warsaw

k.bros@uw.edu.pl

BACKGROUND

MODULARITY

WORD LEVEL vs PHRASE LEVEL

THE LIFECYCLE

Bermúdez-Otero & Trousdale 2012:9

the lifecycle and domain narrowing

gradient phonetic processes categorical phrase level → →morphologization, lexicalisation

Polish

3 processes involved:

FD – final devoicing in obstruents, superseded by VA

VA – voice assimilation (obstruents, inside words and across #)

Presonorant VA – Kraków/Poznań dialects

Polish Final Devoicing and Voice Assimilation

chleb 'bread'

chle[p] chle[b]achle[p] polski chle[b] żytni

sklep 'store'

skle[p] skle[p]uskle[p] sportowy skle[b] warzywny

Kraków/Poznań 'presonorant voicing'

chle[b] Adama

skle[b] Adama

chle[b] Natalii

ko[p]nąć

ko[p]ać

pochle[b]ny

'CLASSICAL' AUTOSEGMENTAL ANALYSES

(Gussman 1992, Rubach 1996)

delinking cum spreading

word-final obstruents ≠ word-medial

underspecification

Final Devoicing (Rubach 1996:77)

R = Root Node, L = Laryngeal Node, Pw = Phonological Word

the laryngeal node is delinked

the obstruent is unspecified for voice

Cracow Spread (Rubach 1996:82)

voice is spread from a neighbouring segment specified for voice

process preceded by Sonorant Default

parallel OT analysis problematic?

Problems

How to treat voice?

privativebinaryternary distinction

obstruents vs sonorants

default?

spreading properties in obstruents only

1.

Problems

VA as spreading

2-stage operation

assimilation to voiceless

asymmetry

obligatory/default fill-in rules

2.

Problems

The role of prosody

syllable or string-based?

medial phonology vs. edge effects

salience vs. weak positions

3.

Problems

Ordering of processes

Duke-of-York in Kraków/Poznań

xlɛb → xlɛB xl→ ɛb + Adama

laryngeal distinctions for technical purposes?

representational bias 4.

bra[t] 'brother'

bra[d. a]dama 'Adam's brother'

bra[d. m]agdy 'Magda's brother'

bra[t. k]asi 'Kasia's brother'

bra[d. g]osi 'Gosia's brother'

Compare syllabification:

ja.sny 'bright'

za.zna 'will experience'

Full contrast in (C)CN clusters

voiceless voiced

[ɕlɛpɨ] [ʑlɛ]

ślepy 'blind' źle 'badly'

[mɨɕlɛʨ] [ɲiʑl'i]

myśleć 'to think' niźli 'than'

[ɔpɕm'aʨ] [ɔbžm'awɨ]

obśmiać 'to mock' obrzmiały 'swollen'

[rɔspruʨ] [vɛzbraʨ]

rozpruć 'to unstitch' wezbrać 'to rise'

Latest phonetic study with implications for

phonology: Strycharczuk 2012

full obstruent agreement

FD phrase-final

full neutralisation only prepausally

BUT CRUCIALLY:

variability in production

underlying voiced and voiceless asymmetry

= presonorant voicing non-neutralising

UR voiced

ʺunderlyingly voiced presonorant stops have

significantly more voicing than stops followed by

voiceless obstruents [and] significantly less voicing

than stops followed by voiced obstruentsʺ

(Strycharczuk 2012:87)

→partial voicing?

OR

→optional full voicing?

supported by: voicing duration and voicing ratiobimodal distributionmost have 100% voicing during closure

UR voiceless

ʺunderlyingly voiceless stops typically surface with very

little voicing, becoming phonetically

indistinguishable from stops followed by voiceless

obstruentsʺ(Strycharczuk 2012:88)

Jansen (2004)

neutralised obstruents have more voicing

when followed by a sonorant than voiceless

obstruent, but less than before an actively

voiced obstruent

C1C2 incomplete neutralisation

PHONOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE FINDINGS

1. 'Presonorant Voicing' is

categorical but optional

2. 'Presonorant Voicing' is phonetic

MY PROPOSAL

1. There is no FD in the traditional sense

2. LAR contrast preserved word-medially in (C)CN

3. LAR neutralised in CC(C) by cluster homogeneity:

[pst]ry 'colourful' [bzd]ura 'nonsense'

gwia[zd]a 'star' mia[sto] 'town'

chle[p p]olski 'Polish bread' chle[b ž]ytni 'rye bread'

skle[b v]arzywny 'grocery' skle[p s]portowy 'sports store'

Edge effects:

neutralisation across a word boundary

(full laryngeal agreement in obstruents)

pre-pausal devoicing

(delaryngealisation at the phrase level)

STRATAL OT framework

*LAR and AGREE conspiracy at

Phrase Level

*LAR definition close to Lombardi's (1995)laryngeal features are not licensed in obstruents unless

they are adjacent to a sonorant

(reversed)

Markedness:

AGREE CC(C) – adjacent obstruents must agree in voicing

*LAR – obstruents must have no specification for voice ( ~ *+voice and *-voice combined)

Faithfulness:

Ident[LAR] – the input laryngeal specification must be preserved in the output

IdPreson[LAR] – the input laryngeal specification of a presonorant segment must be preserved in the output (Rubach 2008:439)

SCENARIO 1:

● word-final obstruents delaryngealised ● in phrase-level phonology to satisfy *LAR

● unspecified segments lack voicing targets● susceptible to voice spilling when flanked by sonorants● voicing as voice spilling in the phonetics component

sklɛp → sklɛB

sklɛp adama → sklɛB adama

xlɛb → xlɛB

xlɛb adama → xlɛB adama

PLevaluation

of Poznań/Kraków

word-edge effects

*successful candidate in green

SCENARIO 2:

● word-final obstruents delaryngealised only prepausally

● underlying voiced remains voiced● underlying voiceless remains voiceless

= no Final Devoicing of the Warsaw dialect typeprepausal delaryngealisation default feature filling at →the phonetics level

sklɛp → sklɛB

sklɛp adama → sklɛp adama

xlɛb → xlɛB

xlɛb adama → xlɛb adama

Modularity

phonetics-phonology interface

output underspecification by markedness:

fed into the phonetic component filled with a default value

'emergence of the unmarked'

FD as lack of voicing target no right-hand voicing cues(Steriade 1997, Jansen 2004)

Explained:

underlying voiced more prone to 'voicing'

possible domain narrowing(Warsaw)

AND THE LIFE CYCLE:

Poznań/KrakówPhrase-level domain

▐▼

Stabilisation▐▼

Restructuring▐▼

WarsawWord-level domain

Remaining issues:

● the (ir)relevance of IdentOnset

(onset faithfulness does not resolve the directionality problem in multiple clusters syllabified into the onset or followed by sonorant consonants; see Rubach 2008, cf. e.g. Lombardi 1999)

without resorting to some kind of 'contiguity' at the featural level in word-medial position as opposed to edge effects, IdOnset must be active to protect word medial clusters from delaryngealisation in Scenario 1 as opposed to presonorant coda segments

otherwise laryngeal (and other) phonological processes of Polish seem to disregard syllable structure (except sonorant transparency effects, cf. Rubach 1996, 2008)

word-medial

pre-

sonorant

contexts

IdOnset too weak

*the undesirable winning candidate marked in red

But: note the role of IdPreson

cf. original argument against IdOnset by Rubach (2008:438)

* Lar >> IdPreson

VA safe and sound

Conclusion:

high-ranked, practically inviolable AGREE above all else

*Lar >> IdPreson[Lar]

word-medial effects ensured by IdOnset(perhaps to be substituted by an edge effects-

based constraint)

References:

Bermúdez-Otero, R. (2011). ‘Cyclicity’, in Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice (eds), The Blackwell companion to phonology (vol. 4: Phonological interfaces). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019-48.

Bermúdez-Otero, R. and G. Trousdale (2012). ‘Cycles and continua: on unidirectionality and gradualness in language change’, in Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds), The Oxford handbook of the history of English. New York: Oxford University Press, 691-720.

Jansen, W. (2004). Laryngeal Contrast and Phonetic Voicing: A Laboratory Phonology Approach to English, Hungarian, and Dutch. Ph.D. thesis, University of Groningen.

Lombardi, L. (1995). Laryngeal features and privativity. The Linguistic Review 12, pp. 35–59.

Lombardi, L. (1999). Positional faithfulness and voicing assimilation in Optimality Theory. NLLT 17. 267-302.

Rubach, J. (1996). Nonsyllabic analysis of voice assimilation in Polish. Linguistic Inquiry 27, pp. 69–110.

Rubach, J. (2008). Prevocalic faithfulness. Phonology 25, pp. 433–468.

Strycharczuk, P. (2012). Phonetics-phonology interactions in pre-sonorant voicing. PhD thesis, University of Manchester. Available at http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001645.

Many thanks

forYour

attention!