Hostname: page-component-6898cfcb55-zkb6p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-11T11:49:40.343Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ghost Segments in Nonlinear Phonology: Polish Yers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Jolanta Szpyra
Jolanta Szpyra*
Affiliation:
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University
*
Institute of English, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, PI. M. C. Skłodowskiej 4, 20–031 Lublin, Poland
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Nonlinear phonology has proposed several new approaches to the issue of ‘ghost segments‘—segments which have phonological effects of various kinds, but which either never surface or surface only under special circumstances. Mobile vowels in Polish, traditionally known as yers, fall into this category. They have recently been analyzed in terms of syllable-driven epenthesis, as empty vowels, and as floating vocalic matrices. The present paper examines these proposals, points to their problematic aspects, and offers a novel feature-geometric interpretation of yers. They are viewed as empty root nodes whose vocalization, determined by syllable structure, permits the full prosodification of consonants.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , June 1992, pp. 277 - 312
Copyright
© 1992 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

I owe my sincere thanks to Edmund Gussmann, Morris Halle, John McCarthy, Loren Trigo, and the anonymous reviewers for their criticism and valuable comments on this paper. It was written mostly while I was a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst under the Fulbright-Hays Program. I am very grateful to CIES for the grant.

References

Anderson, Stephen R. 1982. The analysis of French shwa. Lg. 58. 534–74.Google Scholar
Archangeli, Diana. 1984. Underspecification in Yawelmani phonology and morphology. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Bagemihl, Bruce. 1991. Syllable structure in Bella Coola. Linguistic Inquiry 22. 589–646.Google Scholar
Bethin, Christina. 1987. Syllable structure and the Polish imperative desinence. Slavic and East European Journal 31. 76–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bethin, Christina. 1989. Polish syllables. Stony Brook: State University of New York, ms.Google Scholar
Clements, George N. 1985. The geometry of phonological features. Phonology Yearbook 2. 225–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clements, George N., and Keyser, Samuel J. 1983. CV phonology: A generative theory of the syllable. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Czaykowska-Higgins, Ewa. 1988. Investigations into Polish morphology and phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Dell, Francois, and Elmedlaoui, Mohamed. 1988. Syllabic consonants in Berber: Some new evidence. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 10. 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dresher, Elan. 1985. Constraints on empty positions in tiered phonology. Cahiers Linguistiques d'Ottawa 14. 1–51.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, John A. 1990. Autosegmental and metrical phonology. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gorecka, Alicja. 1988. Epenthesis and the coda constraints in Polish. Cambridge, MA: MIT, ms.Google Scholar
Gussmann, Edmund. 1980. Studies in abstract phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gussmann, Edmund. 1988. Back to front: Non-linear palatalization and vowels in Polish. Explorations into phonology, ed. by Fisiak, Jacek and Puppel, Stanislaw. Amsterdam: Benjamins, to appear.Google Scholar
Gussmann, Edmund. 1990. Resyllabification and delinking: The case of Polish voicing. Linguistic Inquiry, to appear.Google Scholar
Gussmann, Edmund. 1991. Polish syllable structure: A hypothesis and its problems. Words are physicians for an ailing mind, ed. by Grochowski, Maciej and Weiss, Daniel, 207–13. München: Sagner.Google Scholar
Itô, Junko. 1989. A prosodic theory of epenthesis. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 7. 217–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenstowicz, Michael, and Rubach, Jerzy. 1987. The phonology of syllabic nuclei in Slovak. Lg. 63. 463–97.Google Scholar
Keyser, Samuel J., and Kiparsky, Paul. 1984. Syllable structure in Finnish phonology. Language sound structure, ed. by Aronoff, Mark and Oehrle, Richard T., 7–31. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Laskowski, Roman. 1975. Studia nad morfonologią współezesnego języka polskiego. Wrocław: Ossolineum.Google Scholar
Lightner, Theodore. 1972. Problems in the theory of phonology. Edmonton: Linguistic Research.Google Scholar
Marlett, Stephen A., and Stemberger, Joseph P. 1983. Empty consonants in Seri. Linguistic Inquiry 14. 617–39.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John. 1988. Feature geometry and dependency: A review. Phonetica 43. 84–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John, and Prince, Alan S. 1986. Prosodic morphology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, ms.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John, and Prince, Alan S. 1988. Quantitative transfer in reduplicative and templatic morphology. Linguistics in the morning calm 2, ed. by Kim, Seuk-Dik, 3–35. Seoul: Hanshin.Google Scholar
Mester, Armin R., and Itô, Junko. 1989. Feature predictability and underspecification: Palatal prosody in Japanese mimetics. Lg. 65. 258–93.Google Scholar
Piotrowski, Marek. 1992. Polish yers in non-linear phonology. Phonologica 1988, ed. by Dressier, Wolfgang U., Luschützky, Hans C., Pfeiffer, Oskar E., and Rennison, John R., 215–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rubach, Jerzy. 1984. Cyclic and lexical phonology: The structure of Polish. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubach, Jerzy. 1986. Abstract vowels in three dimensional phonology: The yers. The Linguistic Review 5. 247–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubach, Jerzy, and Boon, Geert. 1990. Syllable structure assignment in Polish. Phonology 7. 121–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruszkiewicz, Piotr. 1989. Constraining the rule of Lower in Polish. Folia Linguistica 23. 317–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sagey, Elisabeth. 1986. The representation of features and relations in non-linear phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 1982. The syllable. The structure of phonological representations 2, ed. by van, Harry Hulst, der and Smith, Norval, 337–84. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Spencer, Andrew. 1985. A non-linear analysis of vowel-zero alternations in Polish. Journal of Linguistics 22. 249–80.Google Scholar
Steele, Robert. 1973. The segmental phonology of contemporary Standard Polish. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University dissertation.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca. 1982. Greek prosodies and the nature of syllabification. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Szpyra, Jolanta. 1989. The phonology-morphology interface: Cycles, levels, and words. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Szpyra, Jolanta. 1991. Coronalization versus dorsalization—characterizing palatalization in Polish. Lublin: Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, ms.Google Scholar
Vago, Robert. 1989. Empty consonants in the moraic phonology of Hungarian. New York, NY: City University of New York, ms.Google Scholar
Walińska, Hanna. 1990. Paradigmatic shift in Polish. Amsterdam, ms.Google Scholar