O AKCENTUACJI POLSKIEJ
On Polish Accentuation

Summary/Abstract: In A. Markowski's linguistic guidebook, there is a chapter entitled Jak akcentować poprawnie wyrazy i formy wyrazowe (How to Accentuate Words Correctly), including the same information as in any books on Polish grammar. However, I doubt about some of it, and take a chance to present my own view on Polish accentuation, different from the traditional one. It includes two main ideas: 1) Stress occurs not only in separate words, but also in phrases. As far as two-word phrases are concerned, the stress is never equal for both of them, thus accentuation like *'ładna po'goda ('nice 'weather) never exists. In most cases, the first word has a minor stress and the second word has the major one, e.g. trzę'sienie ''ziemi (earthquake) (which is proved by homonyms like 'często''chowa ('often ''hides) = Często'chowa (the name of a Polish town), while a reverse accentuation, e.g. ''matka 'moja (mother mine), occurs more seldom. 2) What matters in accentuation development is irregular sound change caused by frequency.

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