Polish vowel backing: a feature geometric approach
Slawomir Zdziebko
August 2018 

Polish vowel backing involves the integration of the vocalic nodes marked for feature [open] into the structure of the stems. The floating vocalic nodes constitute the realization of the categorizing N-heads merged with the roots. The items which always possess front vowels in the context of the palatalized consonant are represented with their final vowel-consonant sequences sharing the V-place nodes, thus any instance of palatalization will always affect both the vowel and the consonant. Such items, as well as what Gussmann (1980) calls ‘positive exceptions to Backing’ (e.g. kobi/et/+a ‘woman, nom, sg.’ and bi/es/ ‘devil, nom, sg.’) realize the root and the N-head by means of the stem exponent. The items which show backing in spite of the presence of palatalizing suffixes (e.g. śl/adz'/+ik ‘trace, dim, nom, sg.’) will be shown to be in fact complex words composed of the root, N-head realized as the backing autosegment, and an N/A-head realized as a palatalizing suffix.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003640 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Zdziebko, Sławomir (2018) Polish vowel backing: a feature geometric approach. In Wojciech Guz and Bogdan Szymanek (eds.) Canonical and non-canonical structures in Polish. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, pp. 211-245.
keywords:	backing, opacity, palatalization, polish, feature geometry, ot, morphology, phonology
previous versions:	v2 [April 2018] v1 [August 2017]
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