현대러시아어의 유성성 자질

Voicing in Russian: Contrast and Distribution

This article first surveys the phenomena of voicing assimilation and devoicing in terms domain (morphological word and phonological word/phrase) and scope (within the scope of segment and in the segmental sequence), and then discusses the contrastive behavior between obstruents and non-obstruents with respect to voicing assimilation. Previous attempts at explaining the non-assimilative power of vowels and sonorants are critically examined. The non-obstruents have been suggested to have the voicing feature redundantly, so that their voicing feature do not trigger voicing assimilation during phonological processes. Instread this paper maintains that obstruents, rather than non-obstruents, are responsible for the lack of assimilation in the sequence of ‘obstruent+vowel/sonorant’, and argues that they have positional variants in terms of tensedness: Before obstruents, they are non-tensed, while before non-obstrents they are tensed. The paper concludes that voicing assimilation takes place because the target obstrents are non-tensed.