Complexity in Polish Phonotactics

This book provides a refreshing perspective on the description, study and representation of consonant clusters in Polish. What are the sources of phonotactic complexity? What properties or principles motivate the phonological structure of initial and final consonant clusters? In answering these questions, a necessary turning point consists in investigating sequences of consonants at their most basic level, namely in terms of phonological features. The analysis is exploratory: it leads to discovering prevalent feature patterns in clusters from which new phonotactic generalizations are derived.

A recurring theme in the book is that phonological features vary in weight depending on (1) their distribution in a cluster, (2) their position in a word, and (3) language domain. Positional feature weight reflects the relative importance of place, manner and voice features (e.g. coronal, dorsal, strident, continuant) in constructing cluster inventories, minimizing cognitive effort, facilitating production and triggering specific casual speech processes. Feature weights give rise to previously unidentified positional preferences. Rankings of features and preferences are a testing ground for principles of sonority, contrast, clarity of perception and ease of articulation.

This volume addresses practitioners in the field seeking new methods of phonotactic modelling and approaches to complexity, as well as students interested in an overview of current research directions in the study of consonant clusters. Sequences of consonants in Polish are certainly among the most remarkable ones that readers will ever encounter in their linguistic explorations. In this volume, they will come to realise that hundreds of unusually long, odd-looking, sonority-violating, morphologically complex and infrequent clusters are in fact well-motivated and structured according to well-defined tactic patterns of features.

Auteur
Paula Orzechowska, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of English (Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna, Poland). In 2011, she was employed in projects at the Institute of German Linguistics (University of Marburg, Germany), and acted as full professor at the Department of English and American Studies (University of Potsdam, Germany) from 2011 to 2013. Dr Orzechowska collaborates with English, German and linguistic institutes and research centres in Germany, Austria and France, working in international projects and completing short-term grants. Since 2016, she has been head of the project The Role of Phonological Features in Phonotactics: A Study on Structure and Learnability of Consonant Clusters in Slavic and Germanic Languages financed by the National Science Centre (Poland). Her main research interests are in phonetics and phonology, morphonology, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. She has previously worked on prosody, particularly on (mor)phonotactics and word stress of Germanic, Slavic and selected Afro-Asiatic systems. Her most recent theoretical and experimental contributions were published in journals such as Frontiers in Psychology, Language Cognition and Neuroscience, and Folia Linguistica.

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