Phonological Relations Between Palatalizers and the Phonemic System: A Case Study on Czech

Abstract

This paper examines palatalization in Czech, focusing on its behaviour in the domain of noun-deriving suffixes. It argues that Czech palatalization is not an assimilatory process, but a repair mechanism triggered by structurally and lexically deficient phonological units, referred to as palatalizers. These units lack an independent phonetic counterpart and can be identified only through their systematic phonological effects. The analysis proposes that palatalizers and phonemes form a coherent, interactive system whose interrelations determine the surface outcomes of palatalization. The study first introduces a new typology of Czech palatalization patterns, then rejects the assimilatory interpretation and develops a model in which palatalizers are reconstructed as independent but deficient phonological objects. The analysis adopts the framework of Substance-Free Phonology, which allows phonological processes to be modelled without direct dependence on phonetic data. This approach is particularly suitable given that palatalization exhibits widely varying phonetic realizations across languages. Building on this, the paper specifies the internal structure of palatalizers and the representation of their deficiency, and proposes a computational mechanism that predicts the interaction between palatalizers and target consonants. The resulting model predicts which phonemic classes undergo palatalization and which resist it.