Polish Syllable Structure

The syllable as a phonological prosodic constituent serves to organize segment sequences in terms of sonority, associating sonority peaks/syllabic segments with syllable nuclei and non‐syllabic segments with syllable margins as onsets and codas (Blevins 1995; Zec 2007). The sequencing of segments within onsets and codas is also said to be governed by sonority, in that sonority rises toward the syllable peak and falls after it (Sievers 1881; Jespersen 1904); this has been formalized in the generative phonological literature as a sonority sequencing principle/generalization (Selkirk 1982, 1984; Clements 1990;chapter49:sonority). Because syllable structure is not contrastive, it is most likely created by syllabification processes as part of a phonological derivation or selected by a set of syllable structure constraints in an output‐oriented framework. In either case, certain organizational principles hold on segment sequencing within a syllable, and the question is how these properties of syllables are implemented. Polish has contributed to discussions on syllable structure primarily by virtue of its extraordinarily complex consonant clusters, which appear to violate the sonority sequencing generalization. It also has a set of nasal vowels that bear on the structure of the syllable nucleus, and vowel—zero alternations that interact with syllabification.