<OT> New Posting: ROA-603

[roa@ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 603-0503

Opacity and Sound Change in the Polish Lexicon [Dissertation]

Nathan Sanders <nsanders@williams.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=603


Abstract:
The main goal of this dissertation is to provide a generative
account of phonological opacity within a framework built
upon direct mapping in the synchronic grammar without abstract
intermediate representations, as in standard Optimality
Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993/2002).  Such a framework
predicts that certain types of opacity cannot be synchronically
productive.  I take this prediction seriously and develop
an analysis in which opacity is shown to arise from the
interaction of sound change and a strong version of Prince
and Smolensky's principle of lexicon optimization, in which
the underlying lexicon is 'optimized' by becoming more faithful
to the surface pronunciation.  This interaction results
in a progressive encoding of sound changes directly into
the evolving lexicon, mirroring the stepwise effect of multistrat
al derivations, but diachronically rather than synchronically,
preserving direct mapping.


The specific theoretical framework used in this dissertation
is Faithfulness, Dispersion, and Markedness in OT (FDM-OT),
which differs from standard OT by offering a functional
account of sound change and synchronic phonology through
the interaction of faithfulness (along the lines of McCarthy
and Prince 1995), dispersion (generalized from Dispersion
Theory (Flemming 1995, Padgett 1997, and Ní Chiosáin and
Padgett 2001)), and universally ranked articulatory markedness
constraints.  Grounded in cognition, acoustics, and articulation,
FDM-OT explains and predicts phonological patterns with
fewer arbitrary or abstract stipulations than are required
by competing theories.


I analyze three well-known instances of opacity from Polish,
the language of focus.  Additionally, I provide analyses
of opacity in refined Low German, Turkish, and Tuyuca, arguing
that all cases of opacity fit into the following typology:
(i) synchronically unproductive opacity, which fails to
apply to nonce forms and to lexical exceptions but is still
pervasive in the lexicon due to lexicon optimization; (ii)
morphologically conditioned opacity, which may be synchronically
productive, but only at particular morphological boundaries
because the relevant affixes have allomorphs created by
lexicon optimization that are encoded with historically
opaque alternations; and (iii) transparent 'opacity', which
can be reanalyzed transparently because original opaque
analyses lacked sufficient phonetic detail or access to
certain recent theoretical advances, such as FDM-OT's dispersion
constraints.

Keywords: phonology, polish, opacity, sound change, lexicon optimization, dispersion theory

Areas: Phonology

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=603