Analysis of the behavior of fricatives /s/ and /z/ by TO

Abstract

Our work runs over the realization of the fricatives /s/ and /z/ on the right edge of morphemes on the Brazilian portuguese, especially on the gaucho dialect, in reference to the model of the Standard Optimality Theory. The data we have considered refer mainly to prefixes, although, the statements concluded here do not limit themselves only to this morphological boundary, but also to the boundaries of other morphemes, including words. Our proposal takes as a foundation the hypothesis that the underlying representation of the fricative is /z/. Giving account of the distinct realization of this fricative on the surface are the context-sensitive markedness constraints *[s] [+cons,+voz] and *voiced-coda and the faithfulness constraint Ident-IO ranked in this specific order. The analysis shows that it is possible to observe this aspect of the phonology of the PB though the standard Optimality Theory.