A Phonetically-Based Optimality Theoretic Account of Consonant ...

Place assimilation is not limited to consonants preceding a stop; it occurs also before nasals
and sibilants: IlaK rrllJ 'six tokens' [laknii] '" [lamnii]; llaK syl 'Six-Keys' [laksy] '"
[lassy]9.
It is my impression that coronal codas are the most likely to undergo place
assimilation, while labial codas are the least likely to undergo place assimilation. This
observation is supported by the frequency of the documented assimilated codas in Zhang
(1983: 22-23).
Pre-pausally:
Pre-pausal codas undergo glottalization, and lenition is not (perceptually) attested in
this environment. Here, pre-pausal position includes utterance-final position and utterance­
medial but pre-pausal positions in careful speech.
Word-initially:
Finally, I would like to re-iterate that word-initial stops never undergo lenition;
supraglottal closure always obtains whether the stop occurs in phrase-initial or phrase­
medial positions.
Consistency in intervocalic lenition:
Note from the previous discussion of word-final consonants that lenition is
consistent in the pre-vocalic position, but more variable in the pre-consonantal position.
In sum, word-final reduction appears to be a rather general phenomenon in
Taiwanese, occurring (at least) in all phrase-/utterance-medial positions. I suggest that
Jun's (1995) Optimality Theoretic analysis of place assimilation can be extended to account
for reduction in Taiwanese. The next section will review the parts of Jun (1995) relevant to
the analysis of Taiwanese.
9 The continuancy feature of Cl is also assimilated by C2 in this example.
7