German fricatives: coda devoicing or positional faithfulness?

250 Jill Beckman, Michael Jessen and Catherine Ringen
two parameters was significant, it was most often voicing duration (for
eleven speakers), but the opposite situation, where just fricative duration
was significant, occurred as well (for three speakers).
For 27 of 31 speakers (discounting the one with 100% syllabic
sonorants, which constitutes neutral evidence), these results can only be
modelled with a phonological analysis that is based on presonorant faithfulness.
Coda devoicing, on the other hand, would predict that all the
items investigated here have the same phonetic characteristics (no voicing,
or very short voicing tail and long fricative duration), because all occur in
the coda, where the voiced/voiceless contrast for fricatives would be neutralised.
Coda devoicing could only capture the remaining four speakers
for whom predicted voiced fricatives are statistically the same as their
predicted voiceless counterparts.
4 Some remarks on variation
4.1 Variation in sonorant syllabicity
There are two distinct types of variation documented in our experimental
data: variation in the syllabicity of the liquid in the target fricative+liquid
clusters, and variation in the duration/percentage of voicing produced in
the predicted voiced fricatives. The first type of variation, we argue, can
be accounted for by means of unranked constraints in the phonology. The
variation in voicing production, however, we attribute to the difficulty of
producing voicing in fricatives. We will first illustrate the key aspects of
the syllabification analysis, and then turn our attention to the treatment
of the variable fricative voicing.
As noted above, the experimental data showed variation between a
coda-onset pronunciation of the target fricative+liquid clusters (e.g.
gru[z.l]ig) and a pronunciation in which the fricative appeared in the onset
of a syllable with a syllabic sonorant nucleus (e.g. gru[.z&.l]ig). This variation
can be captured in Optimality Theory with crucially unranked
constraints (Anttila 1997, Ringen & Heinämäki 1999). If two constraints
are crucially unranked, either ranking results in a possible output. In the
case at hand, the unranked constraints are *PEAKLIQUID and NOCODA.
(18)
*PeakLiquid (cf. Prince & Smolensky 1993)
Liquids are prohibited in syllable peaks.
Also essential to the analysis is an undominated phonotactic constraint,
shown in (19). Note that *COMPLEX is not sufficient to rule out these onset
clusters – complex onsets are entirely legal word-initially, but [zl] and [zH]
are banned even in this position.
(19)
*[zl]/[z]
[zl] and [z] clusters are prohibited in onset position.