WA Friday Lunch Talk - POST-DOCTORAL LECTURE, March 19, 13:15-14:15, "Complexity in Polish phonotactics" by dr hab. Paula Orzechowska

ABSTRACT

The core of this presentation is to explore the nature of phonotactic complexity on the example of sequences of consonants in Polish. What are the sources of phonotactic complexity? What properties or principles motivate the phonological structure of initial and final consonant clusters? In answering these questions, a necessary turning point consists in investigating sequences of consonants at their most basic level, namely in terms of phonological features. The analysis is exploratory: it leads to discovering prevalent feature patterns in clusters from which new phonotactic generalizations are derived.
The focus of the talk is to argue that phonological features vary in weight depending on (1) their distribution in a cluster, (2) their position in a word, and (3) a language function activated. Feature weight reflects the relative importance of place, manner and voice features (e.g. coronal, dorsal, strident, continuant) in constructing cluster inventories, minimizing cognitive effort, facilitating production and triggering specific casual speech processes. Such an analysis gives rise to previously unidentified positional preferences. Rankings of features and preferences are a testing ground for principles of sonority, contrast, clarity of perception and ease of articulation.
Sequences of consonants in Polish are certainly among the most remarkable ones that have been reported in the subject literature. In this presentation, it will be demonstrated that hundreds of unusually long, odd-looking, sonority-violating, morphologically complex and infrequent clusters are in fact well-motivated and structured according to well-defined tactic patterns of features.
 

Dr hab. Paula Orzechowska is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of English (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland). In years 2011-2013, she was employed at the Institute of German Linguistics (University of Marburg, Germany) and the Department of English and American Studies (University of Potsdam, Germany). Dr hab. Orzechowska has collaborated with English, German and linguistic institutes and research centres in Germany, Austria and France. Since 2016, she has been head of the project The Role of Phonological Features in Phonotactics: A Study on Structure and Learnability of Consonant Clusters in Slavic and Germanic Languages financed by the National Science Centre (Poland). Her main research interests are in phonetics and phonology, morphonology, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. She has previously worked on prosody, particularly on (mor)phonotactics and word stress of Germanic, Slavic and selected Afro-Asiatic systems. Her most recent theoretical and experimental contributions were published in journals such as Frontiers in Psychology, Language Cognition and Neuroscience, and Folia Linguistica.