<OT> New Posting: ROA-703

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ROA 703-0105

Opacity in Tiberian Hebrew: Morphology, not phonology

Antony D. Green <toniogreen at web.de>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=703


Abstract:
The phenomenon of phonological opacity has been the subject
of much debate in recent years, with scholars opposed to
the Optimality Theory (OT) research program arguing that
opacity proves OT must be false, while the solutions proposed
within OT, such as sympathy theory and stratal OT , have
proved to be unsatisfying to many OT proponents, who have
found these proposals to be inconsistent with the parallelist
approach to phonological processes otherwise characteristic
of OT. In this paper I reexamine one of the best known cases
of opacity, that found in three processes of Tiberian Hebrew
(TH), and argue that these processes only appear to be opaque,
because previous analyses have treated them as pure phonology,
rather than as an interaction between phonology and morphology.
Once it is recognized that certain words of TH are lexically
marked to end with a syllabic trochee, and that the goal
of paradigm uniformity exerts grammatical pressure on phonology,
the three processes no longer present a problem to parallelist
OT. The results suggest the possibility that all crosslinguistic
instances of apparent opacity can be explained in terms
of the phonology-morphology interface and that purely phonologica
l opacity does not exist. If this claim is true, then parallelist
OT can be defended against its detractors without the need
for additional mechanisms like sympathy theory and stratal OT.

Comments: In Papers in phonetics and phonology, ed. S. Fuchs and S. Hamann, 37-70. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 37 (December 2004)
Keywords: opacity, Tiberian Hebrew, paradigm uniformity
Areas: Phonology,Morphology
Type: Manuscript

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=703