Clitics and Voicing in Dutch

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper considers the interaction of voicing processes and clitic attachment in Dutch. This forms a challenge to phonological theories since clitic attachment shows opaque interaction with final devoicing, and in addition voice assimilation in cliticized structures is subject to variation. I propose a two-level Optimality Theory (OT) analysis (Prince and Smolensky 1993, Kiparsky 2000) of these data, in which the existence of two levels can han-dle the opaque interaction, and a combination of prosodic structure constraints and segmental constrains accounts for the attested variation.