Description
This book is a comprehensive phonology of Polish, covering all the fundamental characteristics and problems associated with the language. It is written by a professor of Polish language at the University of Warsaw, and is aimed at scholars and advanced students of Polish and Slavic phonology.
This book is the most complete phonology of contemporary Polish ever published. It is topic-oriented and presents the fundamental characteristics and problems associated with each topic, among them syllable structure, vowel-zero alternations, palatalizations, and other vowel and consonant changes. Professor Gussmann re-examines assumptions about phonological contrasts and alternations, and raises and addresses central questions in morphophonology. He takes morphophonology to be systematically separate from phonology. Palatalizations, he shows, are crucial to Polish, as both phonological and morphophonological phenomena: their detailed description leads him to a systematic presentation of vocalic alternations. The book develops a Government Phonology account of Polish, but is primarily a description of the language with the model subordinated to the organization of data. All the many examples used to illustrate the presentation are transcribed in standard IPA, and translated. This important book will interest all scholars and advanced students of Polish and Slavic phonology.