The Phonology of Stress in Polish (review)

This book is a description and analysis of the stress system of Contemporary Standard (Warsaw) Polish within the framework of optimality theory (OT). There are four chapters: ‘Introduction’ (1–11), ‘Word-foot structure’ (12–30), ‘Stress and clitics’ (31–78), and ‘Relative stress prominence’ (79–110). The book concludes with a list of references. There is no index. Polish stress is considered not only within minimal domains, that is, domains comprising a single noncliticized phonological word, but also within nonminimal domains, of which there are two types: cliticized phonological words and compounds. The author treats both the position of the primary stress and the location and interrelationship of nonprimary stresses within these domains. Analytically, therefore, she is concerned with both alignment constraints and grid representation.

Ch. 1 provides a brief, but adequate, introduction to the fundamentals of OT and syllabic structure in Polish. The author emphasizes the goal of OT, which is not rules and derivations, but constraints, presumably universal, and the parametric variation among languages in their formulation and ranking. These form the focus of the following chapters. Ch. 2 presents and illustrates constraints which establish foot-type, alignment, and syllabic structure for noncliticized phonological words and compounds, and concludes with a discussion of lexical exceptions to penultimate, that is, regular, stress within the framework of OT. Ch. 3 extends this analysis to cliticized phonological words. This requires subcategorization of clitics, not only on the basis of position, into enclitics and proclitics, but also on the basis of behavior, into phonological words and affixes. The footing of cliticized phonological words leads to the identification of additional alignment constraints and of two edge-marked domains in addition to the phonological word: the morphological word and the phonological unit. Proceeding from the conclusions relating to foot building, the final chapter treats constraints regulating grid construction, that is, constraints that determine the assignment of syllabic prominence, and the rhythmic interaction of syllabically prominent heads to yield the attested contours. The former are discussed under the heading ‘edge constraints’ and the latter under that of ‘alternation constraints’.

This book is excellent as an exposition of Polish stress and as an extended example of OT. In part, its effectiveness is a function of the relatively uncomplicated nature of Polish prosody in its surface manifestation, which, for single noncliticized phonological words, can be summarized, in its most rudimentary form and exceptions aside, as primary stress on the penultimate syllable, and secondary stress on the initial syllable provided it is at least one syllable’s distance from (i.e. not adjacent to) the primary stress. This simplicity facilitates clarity in the author’s initial task of orienting the reader with background, and in the reader’s ability to maintain control of the system as the analysis proceeds to cliticized phonological words, compounds, and syntactic units. But the value of the analysis lies equally in the author’s comprehensive presentation. Most treatments of Polish stress do not go far beyond a textbook formulation in discussing it and provide little by way of exemplification. Kraska-Szlenk goes well beyond, providing extensive exemplification of differing word-types and the prosody of clitics.