Polish yers revisited

Abstract

It is common in linguistic research to attempt a unified analysis for similar patterns in related languages. In this paper, I argue that to do so for Polish and Russian vowel alternations would be a mistake. Although they share some notable phonological properties, they differ in their prevalence and their extensibility. I present an account of Polish under which vowel alternations are unexceptional, and exceptional blocking of alternation is achieved with lexically indexed constraints. This is the complement of Gouskova’s (2012) account of Russian, which I argue to be desirable on the basis of novel corpus statistics from the Polish lexicon and their divergences from the trends for analogous words in Russian.

Keywords

• Polish
• Slavic
• yers
• vowel alternations
• lexical indexation