Deriving cyclicity: Syllabification and final devoicing in German

It is shown that German syllabification & the accompanying phenomenon of coda devoicing can be elegantly accounted for within the monostratal model of optimality theory under the assumption that the right edge of the stem has to align with the right edge of some syllable: ALIGN-R (stem, (sigma)). If ALIGN-R (stem, (sigma)) ranks higher than NOCODA, a stem-final obstruent is syllabified into the coda if it is followed by a suffix that begins with a sonorant consonant, as in tag-lich [te:k lIc] 'daily'. If ALIGN-R (stem, (sigma)) ranks below ONSET, a stem-final obstruent is syllabified into the onset if it is followed by a suffix that begins with a vowel, as in Tag-ung [ta:g(upsilon)(eng)] 'convention'. Stems that end in an obstruent-sonorant cluster underlyingly & that are followed by a vowel-initial suffix syllabify both consonants into the onset, as demanded by the two constraints ONSET & NOCODA, which enforce onset maximization. ALIGN-R is irrelevant in the syllabification of these forms. This phenomenon is accounted for under the assumption that alignment constraints of the MCat-PCat type are evaluated categorically (McCarthy, John, & Prince, Alan, 1994; Merchant, Jason, 1994, 1995). 16 Tables, 54 References. Adapted from the source document