On the reality of the laryngeal theory: a response to Witold Manczak (original) (raw)

Dental Obstruent Palatalization in Polish from the Perspective of Modern American Phonological Theories

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a formal analysis of palatalization of dental obstruents in Polish from the perspective of selected phonological theories. The thesis is organised in the following way. Chapter 1 provides theoretical and descriptive background for the subsequent analysis. It outlines the main tenets of SPE phonology, Lexical Phonology, Feature Geometry, Optimality Theory and Derivation Optimality, in the fragments that are relevant for the discussion in later chapters. Chapter 2 presents analyses of Coronal Palatalization and Surface Palatalization in SPE, Lexical Phonology framework and Feature Geometry. It shows that Coronal Palatalization and Surface Palatalization need to be analysed as separate rules and cannot be collapsed into one general palatalization rule. In Chapter 3 the analysis is recast in the framework of Optimality Theory, which is shown to be incapable of accounting for the facts of Polish in a fully parallel manner, without admitting level distinction. Chapter 4 provides a summary of the conclusions presented in the preceding chapters.

Laryngeal realism and laryngeal relativism : two voicing systems in Polish?

2011

Th is paper argues against the ‘what you see is what you get’ bias in laryngeal phonology. It contains a new analysis of voicing in modern Polish, which incorporates phonetic interpretation into representation based phonology, and which assumes that the relation between the two aspects of sound systems is largely arbitrary. It is demonstrated that Polish in fact possesses two opposite laryngeal systems, corresponding to its two major dialects and yielding virtually identical phonetic facts, except for the phenomenon of Cracow sandhi voicing.

New Laryngeal Realism meets Polish voicing

2018

Polish voicing data have long been in the centre of the phonological debate as they present a formidable puzzle which requires theoretical decisions concerning representation, computation, as well as the relation between phonology and phonetics. Recent findings in experimental phonetics further complicate the discussion in that now one of the central problems in phonological analyses of obstruent devoicing or voicing assimilations is whether the incompleteness of neutralisation should be formally expressed and how. As a result, it appears that approaches striving to accommodate the experimental results begin to resemble traditional Generative proposals in some respects, and thus nearly a full circle in the development of phonological theory has been made.

Indo-European Linguistics in the 21st Century (3) Optimizing the Laryngeal Theory: Testing the Models of Puhvel, Eichner and Melchert/Rix against Szemerényi’s Monolaryngealism

2019

Since both the orthodox (MØLLER, BENVENISTE, PUHVEL) and the revisionist (KURYŁOWICZ, EICHNER, MELCHERT/RIX, KORTLANDT) models of the laryngeal theory (LT) have failed to solve the problem of the IE vowels (PYYSALO & JANHUNEN 2018a, 2018b), revisions in the theory are necessary. A comparison of the models of PUHVEL, EICHNER, and MELCHERT-RIX with regard to the criterion of economy shows that, although they are mutually contradictory, each of them has contributed at least one correct solution absent in the other models. By combining these correct solutions into a single model we can arrive at what may be termed the “Optimized Laryngeal Theory” (OLT), which, then, can be tested against monolaryngealism, as formulated by SZEMERÉNYI. 1 The reconstruction models to be analyzed 1.1 Hermann MØLLER’s (1879, 1880, 1906, 1911) laryngeal theory originally assumed three laryngeals *h1 *h2 *h3, a single vowel *e, and the Semitic root morphology CC·C for Proto-Indo-European (PIE). After Bedřich H...