Voicing Assimilation in English Revisited

Abstract

Kang, Seok-Keun. 2002. Voicing Assimilation in English Revisited. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 27-1, 1-24. The purpose of this paper is to reexamine English voicing assimilation within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1995). I show that none of the previous analyses provide a satisfactory account of the phenomenon, not only because they do not cover all the relevant data but also because their analyses encounter apparent counter-examples. This paper, first, presents a comprehensive set of data related to voicing assimilation, discussing where it applies and where it does not. Particularly, I propose IDPRELAR in order to account for prefixes' not being subject to voicing assimilation. I also show that with the addition of AGRFAST, the account of the voicing assimilation in postlexical level is straightforward. In conclusion, I argue for the constraint ranking AGRFAST ≫ IDWD, IDONSLAR, IDPRELAR ≫ AGREE ≫ IDMS, IDLAR ≫ *LAR, IDRT. Given this ranking, all the voicing agreement and disagreement patterns in English can be accounted for in a unified way. (Wonkwang University)