%0 Journal Article %T Inherent circularity in laryngeal realism? Three levels of explanation of the pre-sonorant sandhi patterns in Polish (Part 2) %A Cyran, Eugeniusz %J Studies in Polish Linguistics %V Early Access %N Vol. 19, Issue 3 %K pre-sonorant sandhi voicing, circularity, phonetics-phonology interface, levels of explanation, laryngeal realism, laryngeal relativism, privativity %@ 1732-8160 %U https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/studies-in-polish-linguistics/article/inherent-circularity-in-laryngeal-realism-three-levels-of-explanation-of-the-pre-sonorant-sandhi-patterns-in-polish-part-2 %X The current part of the article discusses the theoretical consequences of the privative approach called new laryngeal realism (e.g. van der Hulst 2015; Wojtkowiak and Schwartz 2018) with respect to the pre-sonorant sandhi effects in Polish, when this assumption is placed in a broader framework of Onset Prominence (Schwartz 2010). While new realism suffers from some circularity, 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.