Volume 49, Issue 4

It is argued that a universal hierarchical organization of features based on phonetic criteria is not a property of mental grammars. Hardening of the palatal glide in the context of labials gave rise to synchronic alternations in dialectal Polish that cannot be generated under analyses that relate structural complexity to phonetic factors. Theories that propose a phonetically-based hierarchical organization of features (various models of feature geometry) are shown to be inadequate because they fail to predict the existence of diverse palatalization patterns within one linguistic system. It is argued that an account of labial palatalization must rely on language-specific generalizations extracted from the data. Two approaches are consistent with this claim: an analogical approach and a substance-free geometrical approach. The proposed analogical analysis employs phonetically-neutral generalizations manipulating segments and the substance-free analysis makes use of Optimality Theoretic constraints that refer to a hierarchy of features established on a language-particular basis.

Three experiments investigating how two groups of adult Polish learners of Danish as a foreign language acquire the Danish dative alternation are reported. Experiment 1 is a speeded acceptability judgment task, which shows that Group 1 has the same pattern as native speakers i.e. slower responses to the dispreffered new-given NP-constructions, but no givenness effect with the PP-constructions. Experiment 2 shows that Group 2 also have acquired this pattern, even though earlier research suggests that the givenness asymmetry in the dative alternation is hard to learn. Experiment 3 shows that even in Polish there is a givenness asymmetry, such that the given–new order is clearly preferred in the NP-construction, but less so in the PP-construction. The rapid acquisition of the Danish pattern could thus be explained by Polish having the same pattern. In short: Both Polish and Danish have a givenness asymmetry in the dative alternation, which could explain why Polish learners of Danish in both groups behave almost like native Danish speakers.

Previous research on word class distribution claimed that 37% of word tokens are nouns, suggesting that there might exist a certain regularity of noun proportion among human languages. To explore this possibility, we examined the proportion of noun and four other word classes within British and American English, and across seven languages in terms of different word frequency band. Results indicated that the noun proportion is evidently about or larger than 37%, and meanwhile increases with word rarity. Among frequent words, nouns increase as minor word classes decrease, whereas among rare words, the noun proportion remains a stable level.

The text presents two case studies from the area of Polish middle voice morpho-syntax. One case concerns anticausatives formed with the particle się and their simpler counterparts based on identical roots. The other – "clear" alternating frame verbs, their prefixed correspondents and middle formations based on the same roots. The first case strikes us as problematic for both modern approaches to morpho-syntax in generative grammar – the lexicalist approach and the root based construction approach. It turns out to be problematic for the first model only, if certain proposals (in particular Alexiadou and Doron 2012) concerning non-active morpho-syntax are discarded. The second case shows, however, that certain data cannot be explained within the root based grammar, while the lexicalist mechanisms account for them naturally. Polish morpho-syntax calls for introducing clear demarcation lines between the data that can be rendered by syntactic mechanisms and such which require lexical analyses and "productivity" of the data cannot provide such a boundary. They need to be drawn on an empirical basis.

This paper presents an acoustic phonetic study of Polish V#V sequences designed to shed light on the phonological representation of glottal marking. Independent phonological evidence from Polish suggests that initial vowels contain an "empty onset" that may be realized as glottal marking. The results of the experiment suggest that glottal marking in Polish is quite robust, and may be realized by increases in spectral balance. In the Onset Prominence environment, the "empty onset" is derived from phonetic principles, realized as specification for the Vocalic Onset layer of structure. VO parameter settings capture important ambiguities in speech perception and allow for a unified analysis of glottal marking, distributional restrictions on Polish vowels, and ambiguities underlying palatalization processes.