Croatian Voicing Assimilation in Optimality Theory

In this paper Croatian voicing assimilation was described within the framework of contemporary Optimality Theory, which is based on the interaction of universal, violable and ranked constraints. This research had two main goals. The first goal was to provide a complete and accurate formal description of Croatian voicing assimilation in Optimality Theory, currently one of the dominant research paradigms in generative phonology. The second goal was to modify the universal set of constraints by postulating a new, phonetically based positional faithfulness constraint IDENT-PS[voice], thus altering the way voicing assimilation should formally be described in OT phonology. By applying the OT framework on Croatian voicing assimilation, certain overlooked facts about its relation to Croatian syllable structure have emerged, most notably the fact that voicing assimilation in Croatian always occurs in the direction from the phonologically weaker segment toward the phonologically stronger segment, where phonological strength is determined by the segment’s proximity to the most sonorous part of the syllable – it’s nucleus. In addition, reasons for the regressive direction of this assimilation have been formalized and explained. By postulating the new faithfulness constraint IDENT-PS[voice], which assigns one violation mark to each case in which the voicing of the input segment is not identical to the voicing of the output segment in the position before a [+sonorant] segment, Optimality Theory has been enriched with a new hypothesis about the nature of the universal grammar