Inherent Circularity in Laryngeal Realism? Three Levels of Explanation of the Pre-sonorant Sandhi Patterns in Polish (Part 1)

The view that phonology is some form of abstraction of phonetics determines the nature of the relation between the two domains and often leads to various types of circularity that allow for descriptively adequate analyses, but do not seem to contribute to a better understanding of sound patterns. Representation-based phonological approaches, such as laryngeal realism, which adhere to privativity, restrict possible phonological mechanisms and enforce multifaceted analyses in which only some phenomena may be phonological, while others must be viewed as interpretational or phonetic in nature. This paper argues for a strict separation of the two domains and focuses on the consequences that new laryngeal realism and relativism entail with respect to the nature of the interface between phonology and phonetics as well as on the understanding of Polish voicing. This article has two parts. Part 1 sets the theoretical background concerning the phonological representation of laryngeal contrasts and provides an overview of approaches to pre-sonorant sandhi in Polish dialects through the lens of various types of representational or computational circularity. Part 2 discusses a recent proposal called new laryngeal realism pointing to its deficiencies and advantages as compared with laryngeal relativism.