On Sonorants and Syllabicity in Polish

It is widely held that sonorants are never syllabic in Polish. This is true at the phonemic level at which stress is assigned, since, e.g., cieplny 'thermal' is accented on its penultimate vowel and brwi 'brows' on its only vowel. On the phonetic level however, syllabicity is a universal feature of word segments with greater sonority than adjacent segments. Phonetically therefore, cieplny is trisyllabic [ce.pl.nI] and brwi is disyllabic [br.vi]. When sonorants are devoiced, e.g., in umyslny 'intentional' and krwi 'blood' (gen. sg.), they are reduced to just their noise component (greatest in /r/, nil in //) and are not syllabic. Adapted from the source document