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ROA:274
Title:Final Devoicing and the stratification of the lexicon in German
Authors:Caroline Fery
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Length:20
Abstract:Final Devoicing and the stratification of the lexicon in German



Caroline Féry

University of Tübingen





This paper examines German Final Devoicing in OT and shows that a full

account of the data requires not only an explanation for Final Devoicing

itself, but also a model of the stratification of the lexicon. The point

of departure of this study is the observation that although various

recently proposed analyses of German Final Devoicing in OT seem to make

equally good predictions for the voicing of obstruents in the word-final

position, none of them makes the right predictions for all data when

ambisyllabic obstruents are also considered.



In the first part of the paper, the data for Final Devoicing in the

word-final position are introduced, as well as the different optimality-

theoretic analyses. In the second section, it is shown that additional

data involving ambisyllabic obstruents in the native vocabulary cannot

be accounted for by these analyses in a straightforward way. The third

section introduces a model of the stratification of the lexicon, in

which the phonological grammar of the language consists of the

markedness constraints only. The faithfulness constraints can in

principle appear between each markedness constraint. This implies that

there can in principle exist as many lexical strata as there are

markedness constraints. Finally, it is shown in the last section how an

account involving two kinds of analyses for Final Devoicing plus the

model for the stratification of the lexicon introduced in the preceding

section can explain all the data.
Type:Paper/tech report
Area/Keywords:
Article:Version 1