Final Devoicing and the Stratification of the Lexicon in German 1. Final Devoicing in the Absolute Final Position 1.1 Data and Pre-ot Analyses

This paper examines German Final Devoicing in OT and shows that a full account of the data requires not only an explanation for Final Devoicing itself, but also a model of the stratification of the lexicon. The point of departure of this study is the observation that although various recently proposed analyses of German Final Devoicing in OT seem to make equally good predictions for the voicing of obstruents in the word-final position, none of them makes the right predictions for all data when ambisyllabic obstruents are also considered. In the first part of the paper, the data for Final Devoicing in the word-final position are introduced, as well as the different optimality-theoretic analyses. In the second section, it is shown that additional data involving ambisyllabic obstruents in the native vocabulary cannot be accounted for by these analyses in a straightforward way. The third section introduces a model of the stratification of the lexicon, in which the phonological grammar of the language consists of the markedness constraints only. The faithfulness constraints can in principle appear between each markedness constraint. This implies that there can in principle exist as many lexical strata as there are markedness constraints. Finally, it is shown in the last section how an account involving two kinds of analyses for Final Devoicing plus the model for the stratification of the lexicon introduced in the preceding section can explain all the data.