Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

OPACITY AND SYMPATHY THEORY
A counterfeeding order enforces rule under-application (as in
[xarca'], [karca'] above) when [AB] meets the structural description of
one of the rules of this grammar (rule 2: B ! C /___ ]) but nevertheless
does not undergo it due to the ordering of rules. Things cannot therefore
be accounted for with respect to the available surface structure.
Counterbleeding order
/AA/
B (rule 1: A!B / A ___ )
X (rule 3: A!X / [ ___ )
[XB]
A counterbleeding order enforces rule over-application (as in
[ale'fka] above). Opacity occurs here due to the fact that the surface form
cannot be traced back to its underlying form as the conditioning
environment for rule 1 has been eliminated (see also Roca 1997).
The area of opacity is a major problem for Optimality Theory
(henceforth OT) as the latter claims to be entirely output-based. As a
result, in an OT tableau, the transparent candidate is always going to be
selected by EVAL. (See tableau 2 below, where the undesired,
transparent candidate*de( is selected instead of the correct de(e.)
Opacity is by no means a rarely attested phenomenon in the
languages of the world. On the contrary, it is very common. Opacity
features in a large number of languages or dialects other than Cypriot
Greek (cf. Roca 1997 for examples from Dutch, Tiberian Hebrew,
Yokuts, Gere, Berber, Icelandic and Kager 1999 for examples from
Tunica, Turkish and Isthmus Nahuat 7 , to mention only a few). The
phenomenon of opacity posits problems to classic OT either because it
appeals to the need for morphology-associated strata or to pre-surface
phonological structure. Below, I quote a relevant example of Tiberian
Hebrew from McCarthy (1998), where the conditioning environment for
the epenthesis of e has been eliminated in the surface representation:
7 in English, too, there is an opaque application of secondary stress retraction (Jansen
1999)
29