Phonetics and Phonology of lexic

This paper explores the usage of antepenultimate and penultimate stress in 1st person plural past tense verb forms in Polish. Although Polish generally has penultimate stress, prescriptive grammars treat these verb forms as an exception, assigning antepenultimate stress. It has been argued elsewhere that penultimate stress is possible in these forms, although in colloquial speech. Data from 40 native speakers confirm that penultimate stress is used, but reveal that it is not restricted to colloquial speech: more than three quarters of speakers used penultimate stress when reading a literary text. Stress was auditorily transcribed by six independent judges. High inter-transcriber agreement was achieved when stress coincided with accent, the acoustic correlates of which were found to be F0 peak and syllable duration. A second experiment, using speech synthesis, revealed that the predominant stress pattern for reading was also the preferred pattern for speech synthesis, even on formal literary texts. 1. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Polish has a strong tendency towards a regular primary stress on the penultimate syllable, and a secondary stress on the initial syllable [19,7]. Notable exceptions are 1st and 2nd person plural forms of verbs in the indicative past. According to Polish prescriptive grammars, antepenultimate stress is assigned to these forms [1], which are built by adding to the past stem elements that are remnants of the auxiliary być “to be” [14]. (1) sprowadzili-śmy moved.MPL-aux1.PL “we moved” In (1) the element “-śmy” and its equivalent for the 2nd person past tense plural “-ście” are treated as verbal auxiliary clitics [10]. Evidence in favour of their clitic status is the fact that they can appear on hosts other than the verb [6], as in (2): (2) Kogo-ście zobaczyli? who-2.PL saw.MPL “who did you see?” Despite a consensus in the prescriptive grammars, there is apparently some optionality in stress placement in the verb forms mentioned above, in that they may receive penultimate instead of antepenultimate stress. According to [4], this variation is conditioned both socially and stylistically. The a “culti speec speak A pho ing st For so thus n instea latter the re syllab clitic, the str In the extent used numb Secon accep regist be ta son-n Consi intros task w verb f or pen found Since espec ively, collec subjec ond, w durati and p additi onset impor nearly the st invest rather is con lates o al stress in Polish verbs