A Generalized Nonlinear Affixation Approach to Polish Palatalizations

The paper offers an autosegmental approach to Polish palatalizations whereby the presence of palatalizing features is the result of the translation of morphosyntactic features into phonological features. In the first part I present an analysis of the structural change of the relevant palatalizations, which boils down to the account of how floating autosegments are integrated into the underlying structures of the stemfinal segments. The second part is preoccupied with how relevant autosegments are inserted into representation: the palatalizing floating features are phonological ‘halves’ of vocabulary items matching the feature sets marking inflectional categories in Polish. The paper finishes with the discussion of the distribution of the endings i/y /i~/ and e /E/ as the markers of the Dative and Locative in one of the declension classes in Polish. I show that the approach advocated here fares better at predicting the distribution of the said endings than the better established approach presented in Gussmann (2007).