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In this article we propose that there are two universal properties for phonological stop assibilations, namely (i) assibilations cannot be triggered by /i/ unless they are also triggered by /j/, and (ii) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. The article presents typological evidence from assibilations in 45 languages supporting both (i) and (ii). It is argued that assibilations are to be captured in the Optimality Theoretic framework by ranking markedness constraints grounded in perception which penalize sequences like [ti] ahead of a faith constraint which militates against the change from /t/ to some sibilant sound. The occurring language types predicted by (i) and (ii) will be shown to involve permutations of the rankings between several different markedness constraints and the one faith constraint. The article demonstrates that there exist several logically possible assibilation types which are ruled out because they would involve illicit rankings. * We would like to thank Marzena Zygis for comments on an earlier version of this article and to Hristo Velkov, who found a number of the examples presented in §3. In this section we present a typology of assibilation rules like the ones in (1) on the basis of our investigation of assibilations in 45 languages (see the appendix for a complete list of the languages discussed in this article and the respective genetic classification). In §3.1 we posit a set of ten logically possible assibilation types, only five of which we maintain are actually attested. The five nonoccurring types will be shown to be excluded due to two properties of assibilations we propose below. In §3.2 we present examples of all of the five occurring assibilation types. (A sixth occurring type will be discussed in §4.3).

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The German uvular /R/ probably shows more surface variation than any other segment in the language. (1) illustrates that /R/ has a vocalic allophone [A], which can surface either as a glide or a vowel, a sonorant consonant allophone, which is pronounced as a uvular trill or approximant, and two obstruent allophones:In the present study I focus on the rules producing the consonantal allophones of /R/ in both Standard German and in certain dialects of the Lower Rhineland (henceforth LRG).

This paper examines the distribution of the palatal fricative [ç] and the velar fricative [x] in Modern Standard German. The data are significant with respect to the theory of Lexical Phonology (Kiparsky 1982, 1985; Halle & Mohanan 1985; Mohanan 1986) because the rule of Fricative Assimilation (FA) which spreads the feature of backness from a vowel onto an immediately following tautomorphemic [ —voice, + high] fricative is a counterexample to Kiparsky's (1985) Structure Preservation hypothesis, according to which non-distinctive features must be introduced postlexically. It is also noteworthy that the present analysis produces both [x] and [ç] from a [— voice, + high] fricative which is unspecified for backness, contrary to the general tendency among previous researchers who have taken either /ç/ or /x/ to be the basic segment.

The present article provides a reanalysis of word-edge coronal obstruents in German and English commonly assumed to be extrasyllabic (e.g. the [s] in German Gips ' plaster ' and in English lapse). It will be argued below that (i) there are no extrasyllabic consonants in surface representations in German and English and that surface forms are fully syllabified, and (ii) there is no derivational stage in which extrasyllabicity in either of these languages exists. The evidence commonly presented in support of representations with extrasyllabic consonants will be shown to be compatible with fully syllabified surface representations. An optimality-theoretic treatment with constraints referring to fully syllabified output representations will be proposed.