| Abstract: | Structural opacity often has derivation histories as deep as the number of structural tiers. This paper uses Mandarin third tone sandhi (T3 sandhi) as a case study of structural opacity to develop the Inter-tier Correspondence Theory (ICT) where structural configurations are taken into account by allowing for nonterminal nodes to reconstruct information of subordinate nodes. ICT marries the insights of both the containment and correspondence approaches to Optimality Theory while predicting that mere adjacency does not result in markedness. Rather, it is to the constituency of units that markedness constraints apply, which is derivation histories are rarely deeper than there are structural tiers. |
