This paper reports on a study of Polish stress, the only uncontested example of a bidirectional system with internal lapses (Kager 2001, McCarthy 2003.The results indicate that Polish stress is non-iterative, a finding that seriously calls into question the existence of this particular stress type. An analysis of the acoustic prominence of syllables traditionally associated with different stress levels suggests that Polish simple words exhibit only one (penultimate) prominence. The stress pattern in compounds is less uniform; they can carry one or two (penultimate) stresses, depending on their prosodic structure. I analyse the distribution of stresses in compounds as governed by clash avoidance. Specifically, compound stems are parsed into separate PWds and assigned separate stresses only if the emergent trochees are non-adjacent. Hence, foursyllable compounds like /tsuJO-t1EmjEts/ ' foreigner ' have one stress, while compounds like /banatnOvO-arbutzOv6/ 'banana-watermelon ' have two. I ascribe this pattern to the undominated ranking of the *FTFT constraint.

Affixation and allomorphy are often phonologically predictable: thus, the English indefinite "a" appears before consonants, and "an" before vowels. We propose a theory of phonological selection that separates rules of morpheme realization from phonological knowledge about the bases and the derived words. This phonological knowledge is encoded in miniature phonotactic grammars, which are learned over sublexicons defined by morphological generalizations. Each sublexical phonotactic grammar determines the likelihood that a new word will follow the associated rule. We examine a complex case of suppletive allomorphy in Russian, whose diminutive suffixes define sublexicons differing in constraints on final consonant place and manner, presence and location of consonant clusters, vowel hiatus, and stress. In elicitation, Russians choose allomorphs for words without diminutives based on how these words and the derived diminutives fare in the sublexical phonotactic grammars. In a nonce word study, Russians also chose allomorphs based on sublexical phonotactic well-formedness, even when the phonotactic violations were non-local to the affix itself. These patterns are missed by alternative approaches such as emergence of the unmarked, insertion rules that refer directly to phonological information, and the Minimal Generalization Learner.

This study examines cross-generational differences in the realization of an English phonological contrast by bilingual Polish Americans in New York City. I analyze the production of voice onset time (VOT) in underlying stops, as intinandden, and stops derived from interdental fricatives, as in [t]in forthinand [d]en forthen, in an English-only reading task. Generation one exhibits VOT “interference” for both stop types, with a bias toward interference for voiced stops. Generation two “transfers” Polish-like VOTs to derived stops. I argue that the cross-generational progression from theglobaleffects of interference to thefocusedpresence of transfer is filtered through L1 markedness and reflects speakers' growing sensitivity to L2 phonology and social considerations. The observed asymmetries in the distribution of interference/transfer are unaccountable by existing models of L2 acquisition and motivate a view of L1/L2 phonetic categories as governed by a variable grammar with access to phonological and social information.

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Ethnicity has long been known to affect language variation. However, existing studies have overwhelmingly focused on the speech of the largest, non‐White minority groups and have rarely investigated within‐group variation. In this paper, I review sociolinguistic studies of a White minority group in two different settings and argue that the study of sociolinguistic variation across and within minority groups can help disentangle and systematize the effect of ethnicity on language. I focus on reports of linguistic variation for Polish immigrants in the United States (a case of sustained, long‐term immigration) and in the United Kingdom (a case of recent migration with indefinite plans for long‐term residence). Through these two case studies, I illustrate that a strong Polish identity affects speakers’ adoption of regional variation in English.