<OT> New Posting: ROA-1058

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 1058-1109

Input-Driven Opacity

Marc Ettlinger <marc at northwestern.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1058


Abstract:
This study addresses the issue of phonological opacity.
While many previous proposals have attempted to offer all-encompa
ssing theories of opacity, the goal of this study is more
modest based on the belief that further understanding of
the phenomenon of opacity will come from looking at specific
types of phonological processes and their interactions,
as opposed to looking at cases of opacity as a singular
phenomenon. To that end, I introduce a new set of generalizations
by focusing on cases involving harmony and tonal interactions.
Indeed, this particular empirical domain suggests a different
understanding of what it even means to be opaque. Furthermore,
the general typological finding is that cases of opacity
involving tonal interactions and harmony reflect greater
faithfulness to underlying representations. This can be
formalized within OT by expanding on two-level markedness
constraints (McCarthy, 1996) and Correspondence Theory (McCarthy
& Prince, 1995) to include diagonal correspondence, a two-level
faithfulness constraint. A specific prediction this approach
makes is that certain types of transparent feeding and bleeding
relationships should not be found when harmonic and tonal
interactions are involved. Instead, opacity is the preferred
type of process interaction i.e. harmony is generally counter-fed
and counter-bled by other phonological processes, contra
the hypothesis that opaque interactions are marked (Kiparsky,
1971).

One of the challenges opacity presents for theories of phonology
is a learnability problem. Indeed, a theory based on increased
faithfulness to input forms requires that language learners
be able to abstract underlying representations for words
despite potentially not hearing them. Using an artificial-grammar
learning paradigm, I show that language learners are indeed
able to do so.  These results suggest that some process
of abstraction is needed to augment theories based on surface-der
ived generalization such as Natural Generative Phonology
(Hooper [Bybee], 1976), exemplar-theory (Pierrehumbert,
1991; Johnson, 1997), statistical theories of phonology
(Goldsmith, 2005) and basic OT. Furthermore, under-application/co
unter-feeding opacity was more learnable than over-application/co
unter-bleeding opacity for harmony contra the hypothesis
that under-application is more marked (Kiparsky, 1968).
Finally, the results make predictions as to the maximum
proportion of opaque to transparent forms allowed in a language.

Comments: Dissertation filed in December 2008.
Keywords: opacity, correspondence theory, harmony, tone, acquisition, typology, Shimakonde
Areas: Phonology,Learnability,Psycholinguistics,Language Acquisition
Type: PhD Dissertation

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1058