Unwarranted exceptionality: The case of Polish y

This paper investigates a single-phoneme approach that does not recognize the phonemic status of the vowel [ɨ]. The analyses presented in the following sections are based on palatalization processes that affect Polish coronals.It is shown that the evaluations under the single-phoneme approach lead to unwarranted exceptionality and involve extensive use of indexedconstraints.These findings are subsequently juxtaposed with the results of analyses where[ɨ] is a member of the phonemic inventory to show that the existence of the segment contributes to fully predictable and regular alternations. Moreover, the analysis of Polis h data motivates level distinction in Optimality Theory.