Arbitrariness in grammar: Palatalization effects in Polish

It is argued that palatalization effects in Polish have no phonological basis in the generative sense. The applicability and the type of palatalization is morpheme specific and cannot be reliably predicted on the basis of phonological universals, such as features or elements. Further, the idiosyncrasies of particular affixes cannot be accounted for in terms of natural classes without losing insight. The learnability of such phonologically-arbitrary patterns undermines the role of phonological naturalness in shaping mental grammars. It is proposed that structuralist and generative accounts of palatalization be abandoned in favor of markedness-free analogical accounts based on rich-memory representations. The proposal to directly encode palatalization effects in lexical representations renders the concept of Underlying Representation obsolete. Pattern extension is analyzed as a phonologically-neutral process driven by analogy.

► Phonological generative accounts fail to derive palatalization effects in Polish. ► The applicability and the type of palatalization is morpheme specific. ► The lexicon contains surface-based, rich-memory representations of words. ► Productivity of palatalization is explained by analogy. ► Phonological naturalness is not a design feature of mental grammars.