Voice assimilation in English as an effect of transderivational anti-faithfulness

The main goal of this paper is to develop the core mechanism illuminating the generalization behind voice assimilation in English. Progressive voice assimilation is, as a default option, most frequently attested in the English data. On the basis of theoretical foundations and results within the constraint-based framework of Optimality Theory and Transderivational Anti-Faithfulness, our analysis provides an effective means for analyzing the voice assimilation at hand. The argument is based on and developed from such contrastive forms as cats and halves. An anti-faithfulness constraint is employed to deal with the semi-productive or irregular nature of the idiosyncratic plural suffix -z. In addition,the base-changing plural suffix -z will invoke lexically-subcategorized anti-faithful ranking of constraints. Such a simple and natural strategy is claimed to allow us to preserve general theory of English grammar at a minimum cost.