Phonetic Reduction of Intervocalic [w] in Contemporary Polish

Sylwester Jaworski

Phonetic Reduction of Intervocalic [w] in Contemporary Polish

Publication date: 06.2021

Studies in Polish Linguistics, Volume 16 (2021), Vol. 16, Issue 2, pp. 79 - 97

https://doi.org/10.4467/23005920SPL.21.004.13958

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Phonetic Reduction of Intervocalic [w] in Contemporary Polish

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an acoustic study concerned with deletion of intervocalic [w] in contemporary Polish. The data for analysis were obtained by asking twenty monolingual native speakers of Polish, ten males and ten females, to tell the story of a film or a book whose protagonist was female. The results revealed that approximately 25% of the sound combinations in question were reduced phonetically to a vowel geminate. In cases of deletion, the formant trajectories of the examined sound sequences either did not show any signs of the glide or the expected drop in formant frequencies throughout the glide section is so slight that it is rather unlikely to produce an auditory impression of a [w] sound. Importantly, in the analysed recordings, w-dropping affects only the glide elements found in various verb forms, while intervocalic [w] appears to be resistant to deletion in the few cases where the glide constitutes an element of the stem, e.g. in the nouns skała ‘rock’and szkoła ‘school’.

Przedstawione w artykule wyniki analizy akustycznej opisują częstotliwość, z jaką międzywokaliczna głoska [w] jest usuwana ze strumienia mowy. Analizie poddano wypowiedzi 20 rodzimych użytkowników języka polskiego, których poproszono o opowiedzenie fabuły filmu, w którym główną postacią jest kobieta. Wyniki analizy akustycznej wskazują, że w ok. 25% przypadków międzywokaliczne [w] nie jest wymawiane, jeśli stanowi element końcówki fleksyjnej czasownika, np. -ała, -iła, -yła. W takich przypadkach trajektorie formantów, jak również ich intensywność, nie wskazywały na obecność półsamogłoski [w] pomiędzy samogłoskami lub zmiany te były tak niewielkie, że nie wywoływały akustycznego wrażenia głoski [w]. W badaniu nie stwierdzono przypadków usunięcia [w], jeśli dźwięk ten znajdował się w podstawie słowotwórczej, np. w słowach skała, szkoła.

Keywords

Polish, phonetic reduction, acoustic analysis

język polski, redukcja fonetyczna, analiza akustyczna

References

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Information

Information: Studies in Polish Linguistics, Volume 16 (2021), Vol. 16, Issue 2, pp. 79 - 97

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/23005920SPL.21.004.13958

Article type: Original article

Titles:

English:

Phonetic Reduction of Intervocalic [w] in Contemporary Polish

Authors

Sylwester Jaworski

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8851-3908

Szczecin University
Poland

Published at: 06.2021

Article status: Open

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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Sylwester Jaworski (Author) - 100%

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English

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