TY - JOUR
TI - Phonetic Reduction of Intervocalic [w] in Contemporary Polish
AU - Jaworski, Sylwester
TI - Phonetic Reduction of Intervocalic [w] in Contemporary Polish
AB - 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’.
VL - Volume 16 (2021)
IS - Vol. 16, Issue 2
PY - 2021
SN - 1732-8160
C1 - 2300-5920
SP - 79
EP - 97
DO - 10.4467/23005920SPL.21.004.13958
UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/studies-in-polish-linguistics/article/phonetic-reduction-of-intervocalic-w-in-contemporary-polish
KW - Polish
KW - phonetic reduction
KW - acoustic analysis