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

OPACITY AND SYMPATHY THEORY
Uniformity & Opacity require pairs of representations: base/reduplicant,
full word/truncatum, simple word/derived word. In a sense, opacity as
well requires an extra pair of representations (other than I-O): ❀candidate
(=sympathetic candidate) / output.
6. An overview of Sympathy Theory
Sympathy Theory (McCarthy 1998), a development of OT, has been
proposed as an attempt of dealing successfully with opacity.
The idea is that EVAL selects the optimal candidate after the
mediation of a designated sympathetic candidate, annotated with a
rosette, ❀, which influences the optimal one, though fails to win. The
sympathetic candidate is selected by a selector constraint, which has to
be a faithfulness one, annotated with a ✮ (e.g. ✮MAX- C in tableau 1).
The key idea is that the selector should choose a candidate in which the
opaque process is motivated transparently. The sympathetic candidate
has to obey the selector constraint. The influence of the sympathetic
candidate on the output is mediated by a sympathetic constraint, also
annotated with a rosette, ❀ (e.g. ❀MAX-V in tableau 1), which has to be
a faithfulness constraint, and in particular a dominated one, as an
undominated one has to be obeyed by every optimal candidate and will be
of no interest to the evaluation process. Therefore a candidate will be the
winnner because it is in sympathy relation with a co-candidate of special
status, which is optimal with regard to a specific dominated constraint.
We should also make clear that we have to set up the selector
constraint and the sympathetic constraint specifically for the ST tableau.
As can be seen, the OT tableau gives the wrong output and this is
precisely why ST is called upon.
Tableau 2: OT selects the wrong candidate in Tiberian Hebrew
/de2C/ CODA– *Cmplx DEP–V
COND
de2e *
☞ de2
(wrong winner)
de2eC *! *
de2C *! *!
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