Final devoicing and voicing assimilation in Dutch derivation and cliticization

In derivational frameworks, final devoicing and voicing assimilation have always been regarded as evidence for rule ordering in Dutch (e.g., Berendsen 1983, Berendsen et al 1984, Zonneveld 1983). In more recent constraint-based approaches, lexical and postlexical levels have been assumed to account for some Dutch voicing phenomena (Booij 1996), and other linguists propose context-specific faithfulness constraints for a few cases of final devoicing and voicing assimilation (e.g. Lombardi 1995, 1996). A unified analysis of all phenomena related to final devoicing and/or voicing assimilation in Dutch has not been proposed yet. In this paper, we will first point out the various problems rule-based approaches encounter when all relevant facts are taken into consideration. We will then suggest an analysis that uses the Correspondence version of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995) and that does not assume different levels, nor Output-Output constraints (Benua 1995), nor a device such as "Sympathy" (McCarthy 1998). Our analysis is based on ideas presented by Booij (1995) and Selkirk (1995) who both suggest that suffixes may differ in their prosodic structure. Some suffixes do not form a Prosodic Word of their own, whereas others do. We argue that clitics in Dutch differ from suffixes in that they are directly adjoined to a Phonological Phrase. Because the prosodic structure is distinct, we expect to find differences regarding syllabification (and, hence, syllable-final devoicing) between the two kinds of suffixes and clitics. We will show that this is in fact the case. We will furthermore demonstrate that prosodic structure is also relevant to voicing assimilation. More specifically, it will be shown that it is more important to preserve the underlying voicing specification of a plosive in initial position of a Prosodic Word than to preserve voicing of a plosive that is not initial in a Prosodic Word. We will develop an analysis with (i) Alignment constraints which say that the edge of certain morphological categories should be aligned with the corresponding edge of a Prosodic Word and (ii) Identity constraints which say that the