Surface Identity and Ternary Scales in Spanish Voicing Assimilation
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چکیده
0. Introduction In several Latin American dialects, Spanish obstruent consonants participate in a process of partial voicing assimilation when they appear in syllable final position. (1) /raskar/ à [rÜ as.kar] 'to scratch' /rasgar/ à [rÜ as z .Far] 1 'to rip' /admirar/ à [aD.mi.rar] 'to admire' /adxuntar/ à [aD T .xun5 .tar] 'to adjoin' In this paper, I develop a novel analysis of this process building on several recent proposals within Optimality Theory. Voicing assimilation results from the interaction of input-output faithfulness constraints and surface identity constraints, which come into direct conflict because the former demand that output segments be identical to their input correspondents, whereas the latter require output segments to be identical to neighboring segments (Gnanadesikan 1997, Grijzenhout and Kraemer 1999). I argue that partial assimilation is optimal because it represents a state of harmony between being completely faithful to the input and achieving total identity to adjacent output segments. More specifically, assimilation is partial due to the fact that the faithfulness constraints that regulate input-to-output mappings (e.g. STAY) outrank the surface identity constraints that force assimilation (e.g. ASSIM). This ranking prevents the loss of voicing specifications from input segments. However, although input-voicing specifications must be preserved, assimilation must take place because ASSIM dominates some of the faithfulness constraints that regulate output-to-input mappings (e.g. RESIST). As a result,
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