The behaviour of /j/, /v/ and /h/ in Hungarian voice assimilation - an OT analysis

The purpose of this paper is to give a unified account of Hungarian voice assimilation phenomena in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). The discussion focuses on the sounds /j/, /v/ and /h/, which sometimes behave as sonorants and sometimes as obstruents with respect to voice assimilation. The OT model presented here is capable of accounting for the ‘exceptional’ as well as the ‘regular’ cases of voice assimilation. Apart from dealing with the Hungarian data, the paper also examines the question whether faithfulness constraints on [voice] apply to output obstruents with a sonorant input.