German fricatives: coda devoicing or positional faithfulness?

238 Jill Beckman, Michael Jessen and Catherine Ringen
The tableaux in (11) illustrate that the optimal output for an input with
a voiceless (unspecified) fricative is one in which the fricative is specified
as [sg] in the output.
(11) Underlying unspecified fricative
a.
b.
pre/s+tsg/+e
i. pre[ssgtsg]e
ii. pre[stsg]e
iii. pre[ssgt]e
pre/s/+en
i. pre[ssg]en
ii. pre[s]en
iii. pre[z]en
*[voi, Ident
sg] (preson fr)
*!
Fric
[sg]
*!
*!
*
Ident
[sg]
*
**!
*
*Voi
Obs
*
Ident
[voi]
*
*[sg]
It’s worth noting that, given the logic of Richness of the Base and
Lexicon Optimisation (Prince & Smolensky 1993), this grammar effectively
requires that German fricatives be specified for either [voice] or [sg]
in lexical representations. (By contrast, the stops will have either a [sg]
specification, or no laryngeal specification at all.) For reasons of space, we
omit the tableaux illustrating the remaining logical possibilities for input
fricative specification; the reader may verify that a fricative which is
specified as [sg] in the input will emerge with the [sg] intact in both preobstruent
and intersonorant position, while an underlyingly [voice, sg]
fricative will pattern like the [voice] fricative in (10).
These constraints also correctly predict that when there are two prosodic
words, a prosodic-word-final fricative will be voiceless, as illustrated
in (12) for grasreich ‘full of grass’.
**
*
*
*
(12)
gra/z/+reich
a. {gra[z]}{reich}
b. {gra[ssg]}{reich}
c. {gra[zsg]}{reich}
d. {gra[s]}{reich}
*[voi,
sg]
*!
PW-
R[sg]
*!
*!
Id(preson
fr)
*
*
Fric
[sg]
*
*
Ident
[sg]
*
*
*Voi
Obs
*
*
Ident
[voi]
*
*
*[sg]
*
*
Interestingly, there are crucial cases involving fricatives where it is
not clear what the facts are. For example, the data in (13) are linguistically
parallel to neblig, Handlung, nörglich in (3b), in that the relevant
obstruent occurs before a sonorant within a prosodic word, but the pronouncing
dictionaries do not agree as to whether the fricatives in (13b)
are voiced ([z]) or voiceless ([s]) (whereas they agree that the stop in neblig
is [b], not [p]). Specifically, Krech et al. (1982) prefer a voiceless