Polish Place-Names and Word-Final Consonant Groups: More Affricates and Diphthongs in Polish?

In this paper, an attempt is made at classifying word-final clusters occurring in Polish place-names from the viewpoint of syllabic structure within a strict CVCV model of Government Phonology. It is proposed here that the phonemic analysis of sounds should be truly abandoned. As a result, we can discover that segments behave according to the unchangeable syllabic structure: more than one segment can be attached to one skeletal position, the string of sounds in a word being preserved and the governing relations being contracted in line with the theoretical assumptions. Consequently, what we have in Polish is occasional diphthongs, affricates and complex segments which need not be recognized as distinctive phonemically.