On ich-Laut, ach-Laut and Structure Preservation

Abstract

Hall (1989) introduces a rule of Fricative Assimilation (FA) in German, which, he claims, poses a challenge to the principle of Structure Preservation in Lexical Phonology, as presented in Kiparsky (1985). This claim is based on the observation that FA is demonstrably lexical because it respects morpheme boundaries, but nonetheless introduces a nondistinctive feature, thus violating a marking condition. However, Hall has not appreciated the force of the analysis of Catalan in Kiparsky (1985), which suggests that assimilated sequences may show special behaviour with respect to marking conditions. In this paper we show first, based on arguments in Kiparsky (1985), Hayes (1986) and Itô (1988), that a general constraint on the interpretation of autosegmental formalism specifically rules out the application of the marking condition to the output of FA.