| Description |
The aim of this talk is to provide a new analysis of assibilation in Standard Finnish verbs and to present a case study of the interaction between stress and segmental processes.
Assibilation applies to stem-final /t/ before /-i/ across a morpheme boundary. It is blocked in immediately post-tonic position, optional following a post-tonic segment, and obligatory if the /ti/ sequence is further away from stress.
Anttila (2007) proposes that assibilation applies to extrametrical /t/, as a result of Positional Faithfulness (Beckmann 1998) to segmental features occurring within the stressed foot.
I argue that assigning stressed feet a positional privilege has major consequences for the predicted factorial typology of Pos-Faith effects, since it faces the challenge of restricting the set of features which can be targeted by stress-conditioned processes.
I propose that the effect of stress on Finnish assibilation is consistent with a more restrictive, phonetically based analysis: assibilation is triggered by the perceptual similarity between the frication noise of [t] before [i] and the frication of [s], and this process is blocked in the vicinity of stress, due to C lengthening in this position.
Acoustic data shows that coronal stops in the obligatory assibilation contexts are acoustically most dissimilar from strident fricatives, while they have the largest burst/total duration ratio in the assibilation context. Results from a perceptual experiment also support the neutralization analysis: /ti/ sequences whose acoustic properties mirror post-tonic /ti/ are discriminated more easily from /si/ sequences, than /ti/ sequences whose acoustic properties are those of far-from-stress /ti/.
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