On the sources of opacity in OT: Coda processes in German
 

Junko Ito & Armin Mester

University of California, Santa Cruz





Phonological opacity poses a well-known problem for the standard version 
 of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) making use only of 
 elementary markedness constraints and faithfulness constraints. A number 
 of remedies have been proposed in the literature, most notably, Sympathy 
 Theory (McCarthy 1998) and level-ordered OT (Kiparsky 1998). This paper 
 takes a different approach and starts out with two questions regarding 
 opacity:  Which elements of current OT-architecture can in principle 
 give rise to opaque output patterns? To what extent do the patterns of 
 opacity derivable in this way cover the empirically existing patterns? 
 Extending the proposal by Lubowicz 1998 on constraints locally 
 conjoining markedness and faithfulness (M&F constraints) as sources of 
 the derived environment syndrome, we show that M&F constraints are also 
 responsible for certain types of opaque output patterns. As its 
 empirical basis, this paper studies the ways in which a group of coda 
 conditions play out in the phonology of German, giving rise to processes 
 whose interaction is opaque in various ways. Sympathy-based analyses 
 turn out to be associated with unappealing stipulations and otherwise 
 unmotivated rankings. The opacity is shown to arise, rather, in a very 
 natural and simple way out of specific conjunctions of markedness and 
 faithfulness constraints that are otherwise operative in German 
 phonology. A discussion of further theoretical ramifications concerning 
 opacity and M&F-conjunctions concludes the paper.