Jerzy Rubach

This article investigates the occurrence of tense vowels in Kurpian and reports on the results of my fieldwork conducted in the villages of central Kurpia. The article looks at declensional paradigms of nouns and concludes that lax vowels alternate with tense vowels when they are followed by a voiced consonant (an obstruent or a sonorant) at the end of the word. The descriptive generalizations are analysed formally in terms of Derivational Optimality Theory, a framework that is well equipped to handle the opacity unveiled by the Kurpian data.

This article presents the vowel system of Kurpian, a dialect of Polish spoken in northern Poland. The data come from the fi eldwork that I conducted in Kurpia over a period of many years. Kurpian has a much richer system of vowel contrasts than Standard Polish, with three high vowels, five mid vowels and two low vowels. While in most contexts these vowels are contrastive, there are also contexts in which they can be derived by general processes of Kurpian. Two such processes are discussed here: Nasal Tensing and Nasal Backing. They are analysed in terms of Optimality Theory.

In classic generative phonology (The Sound Pattern of English, Lexical Phonology) underlying representations and associated rules account for generalizations of two types: alternation-based generalizations and distribution-based generalizations. This article addresses the issue of how distribution-based generalizations are handled in Standard Optimality Theory and in Derivational Optimality Theory. The former uses the principle of the Richness of the Base, the latter relies on underspecification. It is argued that the Richness of the Base and the associated principle of Lexicon Optimization are unable to provide an adequate analysis of three types of generalizations: Nasal Assimilation in English, Vowel Retraction in the process of assimilating borrowings into Polish, and a presonorant voicing process called Cracow Voicing.