<OT> New Posting: ROA-1064

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 1064-1209

Variation as a window into opacity

Marc Ettlinger <marc at northwestern.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1064


Abstract:
Opacity and variation are topics of considerable interest
to contemporary
phonologists because they present significant challenges
for the dominant
theoretical paradigm, Optimality Theory. 
Opacity is problematic for OT, and indeed all surface-based
approaches to phonology (e.g. Natural Generative Phonology),
because opacity results in generalizations not being surface-true
. On the other hand, variation challenges the stipulated
categorical nature of constraint interaction in OT and strict
dominance hierarchies. Save a few notable exceptions (Anttila,
2007; Kawahara, 2002), these two phenomena have been studied
independently. In this paper, I suggest that significant
insight into opacity can be gained by looking at  cases
involving both.
The solution I propose begins by adopting an exemplar-based
theory of phonology (Johnson, 1997) to account for variation.
This approach relies on representations, rather than the
grammar, as a solution by incorporating all variants into
the UR. This can account for variation involving opacity
as well as for cases of opacity that do not involve variation
because of the similarity of primary linguistic data for
these two empirical domains. This takes advantage of a primary
tenet of exemplar-based phonology: that a morpheme’s representati
on consists of the all of the heard tokens of that morpheme.

Comments: Proceedings of 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society
Keywords: phonology, opacity, variation
Areas: Phonology,Learnability
Type: Conference Proceedings Chapter

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1064