Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 49(4), 2013, pp. xxx–xxx © Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland doi:10.1515/psicl-2013-0021 VOWEL HIATUS AT POLISH WORD BOUNDARIES – 5 PHONETIC REALIZATION AND PHONOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS1 GEOFFREY SCHWARTZ Adam Mickiewicz University 10 geoff@wa.amu.edu.pl ABSTRACT 15 This paper presents an acoustic phonetic study of Polish V#V sequences designed to shed light on the phonological representation of glottal marking. Independent phonolog- ical evidence from Polish suggests that initial vowels contain an 'empty onset' that may be realized as glottal marking. The results of the experiment suggest that glottal marking in Polish is quite robust, and may be realized by increases in spectral balance. In the On- 20 set Prominence environment, the 'empty onset' is derived from phonetic principles, real- ized as specification for the Vocalic Onset layer of structure. VO parameter settings cap- ture important ambiguities in speech perception and allow for a unified analysis of glot- tal marking, distributional restrictions on Polish vowels, and ambiguities underlying pal- atalization processes. 25 KEYWORDS: Vowel hiatus; glottalization; phonological representation; word boundaries; Polish language. 30 1. Introduction A significant body of phonetic research (e.g. Umeda 1978; Dilley et al 1996; Redi and Shattuck-Hufnagel 2001; Malisz et al. 2013) has investigated what may be referred to as glottal marking, the presence of a glottal stop or glottal at- 35 1 I would like to thank numerous participants of the 10th Old Word Conference in Phonology in Is- tanbul for their helpful feedback on the poster presentation of the data reported in this paper. Thanks also to the editors and reviewers of PSiCL. This research was supported in part by a grant from the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki), project nr. UMO-2012/05/ HS2/ 04036