Partial Ranking and Alternating Vowels in Polish

1. Introduction The three nominal paradigms in (1) illustrate the fundamental problem posed by Slavic alternating vowels, called yers. In (1b) a full vowel appears throughout the inflectional paradigm; the stem is invariant. In (1c) the stem is also invariant and ends in a consonant cluster regardless of the following inflectional morphology. The paradigm in (1a) contains the yer vowel (underlined). This vowel is phonetically identical to the [ε] in (1b), but, unlike the vowel in (1b), the yer only appears when the following inflection is null and deletes otherwise, creating an alternation in the stem.