German fricatives: coda devoicing or positional faithfulness?

264 Jill Beckman, Michael Jessen and Catherine Ringen
feature in German fricatives; rather, [voice] appears to be primary, with
[sg] serving as the enhancement feature.
A final argument in favour of the [sg] specification of fricatives, with
voicing as a feature of enhancement, might be that the same laryngeal
features should be involved in both stop and fricative contrasts within a
given language. Since stops are specified as [sg], fricatives should be too,
the argument might go. However, there are other languages in which the
stops are specified for one laryngeal feature and fricatives another. For
example, Rice (1994) and Tsuchida et al. (2000) have argued convincingly
for analyses of Athapaskan and English respectively in which the stops
are underlyingly specified as [sg], but the contrast in fricatives involves
[voice]. Unless it can be shown that these and other analyses which involve
different laryngeal specifications for stops and fricatives are incorrect, this
argument does not go through. German, we suggest, is another language
in which the feature of contrast in stops is [sg], but in which fricatives are
specified as [voice].
6 Conclusion
In this paper we have argued that the phonological feature of contrast for
German fricatives is [voice]. (By the logic of Lexicon Optimisation, the
voiceless fricatives in our analysis will be specified as [sg] in lexical representations.)
We have presented new experimental data showing that
German voiced fricatives, regardless of their syllabification, can and do
retain their underlying voicing when followed by a sonorant segment.31
This pattern of behaviour is explained by the positional faithfulness account
we argued for above, but is problematic for an analysis of German
which employs a coda-devoicing constraint. Interestingly, even though
there is substantial variation in both fricative voicing and sonorant syllabicity,
both types of variation are consistent with the positional faithfulness
analysis. The variation in syllabicity of sonorants results from
the existence of unranked constraints in the (phonological) grammar:
*PEAKLIQUID and NOCODA are unranked, allowing either gru.[z&].lig or
gru[z.l]ig to occur as a viable surface output. The variation in fricative
voicing, on the other hand, can be understood in the positional faithfulness
analysis as variable (phonetic) failure to achieve voicing in segments
in which voicing is difficult. There is no comparable explanation available
for this variation in the coda-devoicing analysis.
We conclude that, contrary to the widely held belief, there is no coda
devoicing in German. The obvious question to ask is whether there is coda
devoicing in any language. That is, is there active devoicing that explicitly
31 Our data are consistent with Steriade’s (1999) claim that contrasts are preferentially
maintained in presonorant position.