Lenition and Fortition of Stop Codas in Romanian

The present paper aims at providing a first study of lenition- and fortition-type phenomena in coda position in Romanian, a language that can be considered as less-resourced. Our data show that there are two contexts for devoicing in Romanian: before a voiceless obstruent, which means that there is regressive voicelessness assimilation in the language, and before pause, which means that there is a tendency towards final devoicing proper. The data also show that non-canonical voicing is an instance of voicing assimilation, as it is observed mainly before voiced consonants (voiced obstruents and sonorants alike). Two conclusions can be drawn from our analyses. First, from a phonetic point of view, the two devoicing phenomena exhibit the same behavior regarding place of articulation of the coda, while voicing assimilation displays the reverse tendency. In particular, alveolars, which tend to devoice the most, also voice the least. Second, the two assimilation processes have similarities that could distinguish them from final devoicing as such. Final devoicing seems to be sensitive to speech style and gender of the speaker, while assimilation processes do not. This may indicate that the two kinds of processes are phonologized at two different degrees in the language, assimilation being more accepted and generalized than final devoicing.