/v/ and Voice Assimilation in Hungarian and Russian

A phonetically-based approach to the phonology of [v] in Hungarian</o:p>

“…has an intermediate sonority value (Barkaï -Horvath 1978) 186 zoltán kiss -zsuzsanna bárkányi (e) the use of an additional binary feature [±transient] (Zsigri 1994) (f) feature geometrical approach (Kornai 1994) (g) the use of underspecification/syllable constituents (Siptár 1996;Siptár-Tör-kenczy 2000) (h) non-derivational approaches: Government Phonology (Szigetvári 1998a;b;Cyran 1997;Cyran-Nilsson 1998); Head-Driven Phonology (Ritter 2000); Optimality Theory (Petrova-Szentgyörgyi 2004;Blaho 2005) In this paper, we cannot offer a comprehensive review of all these proposals due to space restrictions; here we only focus on the most important aspects of them. 11…”

“…18 The problem of which variant of [v] is to be posited underlyingly apparently disappears in Optimality Theoretic analyses, owing to the OT architecture and its principle of "Richness of the Base", which states that there are no constraints on inputs; hence either [v], or [V], or, an underspecified [v] can all be assumed underlyingly, and the grammar will still select the grammatical output. This stance is put forth in Petrova-Szentgyörgyi (2004), a paper focusing on [v] in both Hungarian and Russian, two languages where this consonant displays very similar behaviour. The paper starts off by setting up the constraints and their hierarchy, which can account for the voicing assimilation effects.…”

“…This is clearly an attempt thus to connect [v]'s phonetic property with its phonological patterning with regard to the "Voicing Requirement". The burdensome cases, the lopva-type and the Wrangler-type words, are also problematic for Petrova-Szentgyörgyi (2004). Their OT system will wrongly predict sonorant [V] to surface in each of these cases.…”

“…22 *WC is a specialized version (relativized to a following sonorant) of the more general constraint *W, which bans voiced labial approximants (thus supposedly [V], too). This latter constraint is posited by Petrova-Szentgyörgyi (2004) to account for the apparent fact that Russian v never surfaces as a sonorant [V], but it still behaves in a dubious way phonologically. However, see Padgett (2002) and Lulich (2004), who show that Russian v does surface as a (narrow) approximant in some contexts.…”

“…Note that in his examples, he suppresses predictable palatalization, vowel reduction, and other irrelevant surface variation. For more on the Russian data and the exact domain of the voicing phenomena, also consider Halle (1959); Hayes (1984); Petrova (2003); Petrova-Szentgyörgyi (2004). Languages other than the ones we focus on have also been said to show similar [v]-patterns, they include Hebrew (Barkaï-Horvath 1978), Ukrainian (Cyran-Nilsson 1998), Swedish, Romanian (Lombardi 1995), and some dialects of English, too (Petrova-Szentgyörgyi 2004).…”