Open Access(Non)retroflexivity of Slavic affricates and its motivation: evidence from Polish and Czech <č>
Author(s) -
Marzena Żygis
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.42.2005.274
Subject(s) - czech , slavic languages , tonality , linguistics , perception , accidental , loanword , psychology , history , art , philosophy , literature , physics , acoustics , musical , neuroscience
The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, it revises the common assumption that the affricate denotes /t͡ʃ/ for all Slavic languages. On the basis of experimental results it is shown that Slavic stands for two sounds: /t͡ʃ/ as e.g. in Czech and /ʈʂ/ as in Polish.
The second goal of the paper is to show that this difference is not accidental but it is motivated by perceptual relations among sibilants. In Polish, /t͡ʃ/ changed to /ʈʂ/ thus lowering its sibilant tonality and creating a better perceptual distance to /tɕ/, whereas in Czech /t͡ʃ/ did not turn to /ʈʂ/, as the former displayed sufficient perceptual distance to the only affricate present in the inventory, namely, the alveolar /t͡s/. Finally, an analysis of Czech and Polish affricate inventories is offered.