In the first part of the article, two approaches to laryngeal phonology – the realist and the relativist – were introduced and compared with regard to their treatment of the sandhi patterns in two major varieties of Polish. The discussion revolved around three types of circularity that result from the blurring of the line between phonology and phonetics. The current part of the article examines the theoretical consequences of the privative approachcal led new laryngeal realism (e.g. van der Hulst 2015; Wojtkowiak and Schwartz 2018) with respect to the pre-sonorant sandhi effects in Polish, assuming the broader framework of Onset Prominence (Schwartz 2010). While new realism does suffer from circularity to some extent, it seems to capture not only the main phonetic and phonological intuitions about the sandhi phenomena, but it also makes strong claims about the diachronic development of the two major dialects of Polish. In comparison to laryngeal relativism, it leads to a similar structure of sound systems, with strict separation of phonetics and phonology, but it places the explanation of the sandhi phenomena at the interface rather than in the phonology itself. On the other hand, the general Onset Prominence framework appears to subvert these achievements by merging phonetics, phonology and the interface into one system. A solution to this problem may be to assume that the Onset Prominence representation should not be hierarchical, as it reflects the phonetic representation alone.

The article examines the impact of word order and prosody on the meaning of constructions with evaluative adverbs in Polish. While Polish literature on adverbs often suggests that the position of adverbs “proper” carries no semantic significance, unlike that of metatextual particles (some of which are formally identical to them), there exists a specific subclass of adverbs that exhibit similar behaviour to particles in this regard. This subclass, known as subject-oriented adverbs, includes evaluative adverbs, which are the main focus of this analysis.

The article is divided into two parts. Following a brief introduction, Part 1, Section 2, discusses evaluative adverbs in comparison with other subject-oriented adverbs, outlining their shared semantic-syntactic properties. Section 3 focuses on the ambiguity of sentences containing evaluative expressions, which is influenced by word order and/or prosody. In line with structural semantics, the analysis seeks to identify a general mechanism underlying the observed interpretative differences, presenting basic syntactic-semantic formulas corresponding to these variants, along with related prosodic patterns and, consequently, information structure. These considerations lay the groundwork for Part 2, which will extend the analysis through a detailed examination of corpus data.