Abstract
The present paper investigates a segmental phenomenon traditionally referred to as word-final obstruent devoicing in Polish. It is generally assumed that the context in which it applies is solely related to the absolute word-final position before silence. By inference, full voicing of a wordfinal obstruent is retained only when (i) it is followed by a voiced segment (a vowel or a consonant) in an utterance or when (ii) it is appended with a suffix which begins with a vowel. In this research a different group of factors which trigger the process is explored, namely the position of the obstruent within the metrical foot. If, as argued by Harris (2009), noninitial position within the foot is a typical lenition site (contrary to Iverson and Salmons 2007) and if devoicing is regarded as a special manifestation of lenition (through information loss, similarly to vowel reduction), a purely segmental (contextual) conditioning for voicing retention in obstruents word-finally cannot be maintained.
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