Russian voicing assimilation, final devoicing, and the ...

Russian voicing assimilation , final devoicing , and the problem of [v](or, The mouse that squeaked)*Jaye Padgett - University of California, Santa Cruz"..the Standard Russian an obviously intermediate position between the obstruents and the sonorants." Jakobson (1978)1. IntroductionLike the mouse that roared, the Russian consonant [v] has a status in phonology out of proportionto its size. Besides leaving a trail of special descriptive comments, this segment has played a keyrole in discussions about abstractness in phonology, about the manner in which long-distancespreading occurs, and about the the larger organization of phonology. This is largely because ofthe odd behavior of [v] with respect to final devoicing and voicing assimilation in obstruents devoice word-finally, as in kniga 'book (nom. sg.) vs. knik (gen. pl.), andassimilate to the voicing of a following obstruent, gorodok 'town (nom. sg.)' vs. gorotka ( ). The role of [v] in this scenario is puzzling: like an obstruent, it devoices word-finally, krovi'blood (gen.)

obstruent determining the voicing status of the cluster, as shown in (2). The examples in (2)a-c show prefixes ending in underlyingly voiceless obstruents, while (2)d-f show prefixes with underlyingly voiced consonants. The underlying status of the consonants is clear …

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  Russian, Final, Assimilation, Voicings, Consonant, Russian voicing assimilation, Final devoicing, Devoicing

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