Final devoicing and vowel lengthening in Friulian: A representational approach

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Here, I propose an analysis of the interacting between final devoicing and vowel lengthening in Friulian (and other related varieties of northern Italy). Historically, stressed vowels lengthen before voiced obstruents, but this is opacified by final devoicing. I capitalize on phonetic studies showing final devoicing in the language to be incomplete and argue that the process is not in fact opaque: devoicing does not involve neutralization but instead the creation of a third, laryngealy unspecified class of obstruents. I also observe that the distribution of moraicity in Friulian presents a challenge to accepted theories of weight assignment, and propose an analysis that relies on language-specific featural representations.