| ROA: | 370 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Surface Identity and Ternary Scales in Spanish Voicing Assimilation |
| Authors: | Carlos-Eduardo Pineros |
| Comment: | 38 pages. Requires SILDoulous IPA93 fonts |
| Length: | 38 |
| Abstract: | Surface Identity and Ternary Scales in Spanish Voicing Assimilation Carlos-Eduardo Piñeros University of Iowa This paper argues that voicing assimilation is partial in Spanish because it is the best way to satisfy the conflicting requirements that two different types of correspondence relationships impose on output segments. While output segments must remain faithful to their input, they are also required to resemble neighboring segments. Partial voicing assimilation is a harmonic solution to these conflicting demands, where neither of these imperatives is completely subordinated to the other. Rather, they are both partially met. To capture these facts, it is essential to conceive featural correspondence as a bi-directional relationship so that faithfulness/identity can be assessed in terms of both loss and gain of feature values. The use of ternary scales also contributes to our understanding of assimilation processes and sound inventories. On a ternary scale, attraction is a type of assimilation in which adjacent scalar values are enough to satisfy surface identity. The only markedness constraint in the grammar that is concerned with voicing is *IV2, which penalizes voiced obstruents only, since they are the only segmental class where voicing is actually a marked property. Several important generalizations about Spanish are also gained by using markedness constraints that militate against marked scalar values only. It is shown that Spanish has no underlying voiced fricatives. However, partially voiced and fully voiced fricatives arise as optimal output segments when they contribute to enhance surface identity. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |