Abstract

The article focuses on the gradient phonetic effects occurring at the prefix-stem boundary in Polish and their phonological interpretation. The environment of a consonant-final prefix followed by a vowel-initial stem exhibits remarkable variation as to the presence of specific phonetic cues, ranging from their being completely absent or very weak to the presence of strong ones, such as the occurrence of a glottal stop combined with partial devoicing of the prefix-final consonant and full glottalization of the stem-initial vowel. A significant correlation is observed between the number of the phonetic cues marking the morphological boundary and the lexical frequency, as well as certain other factors. The gradient character of the prefix-stem juncture in Polish is independently motivated by the speakers' attitudes as revealed in a psycholinguistic test, which demonstrates that the low-level phonetic features contribute to the mental representation of language grammar. The discussion of the data is conducted in the larger context of Polish sandhi, phonotactics and neighbourhood density effects, providing a functional explanation of the analysed problem and of certain prefix-suffix asymmetries. All the evidence in the article points to the importance of language usage criteria in shaping a language grammar and to the necessity of recognizing this fact in linguistic analysis.