A revised typology of opaque generalisations

Abstract

This paper is about opaque interactions between phonological processes in the two senses defined by Kiparsky (1971, 1973) and discussed in much recent work on the topic, most notably McCarthy (1999) :underapplicationopacity, whereby a process appears to have failed to apply in expected contexts on the surface, andoverapplicationopacity, whereby a process appears to have applied in unexpected contexts on the surface. Specifically, I demonstrate that there are three distinct types of overapplication opacity in addition to the only case discussed and properly categorised as such in the literature, counterbleeding. The analysis of each type of opacity in terms of rule-based serialism and in terms of Optimality Theory is discussed, emphasising the strengths and weaknesses of the two frameworks in each case.