Contrast preservation in Polish Palatalization

There is a great deal of work on the role of contrast preservation in phonology and morphology (Flemming 1996; Padgett 2009; Hall 2011; Mackenzie 2013, among others). This article illustrates contrast preservation with the example of Coronal Palatalization in Polish (Rubach 1984; Gussmann 2007). The basic idea is that contrast is preserved between lexical items despite palatalization due to the choice of different allomorphs as suffixes for original and derived pre-palatals. If the same suffixes were selected for original and pre-palatal consonants, contrast would be neutralized between them in output forms. The analysis will be couched in the framework of PC (‘preserve contrast’) Theory (Łubowicz 2012). Cross-linguistic evidence and implications of the proposal will be examined