Syllabification across a prefix-stem boundary in Polish. The role of semantic compositionality.
This article investigates the relevance of morphological complexity and semantic compositionality to phonetic syllabification of prefixed words in Polish. The discussion focuses on morphologically complex words which contain extrasyllabic consonants in the stem-initial position, e.g. oćmdlec ‘to faint’, zaćrdzewiec ‘to rust’. Evidence is employed from a large-scale syllabification experiment and an analysis of its results is couched within the framework of Optimality Theory.