Blurb:

This paper provides an analysis of Russian voicing assimilation and final devoicing couched within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993 [2004]), one that is cue-based but sensitive to questions of higher prosodic structure. An important goal will be to elucidate areas where the facts have been unclear in the past. Apart from prosody-related matters, this includes for example the controversial status of sonorants in the voicing processes. As we will see there is an important distinction to be made between processes that apply exceptionlessly and categorically and those that do not.