Underapplication Opacity Beyond the Non-Local Compensatory Lengthening in Modern Colloquial Persian

Abstract

This research discusses the underapplication opacity, namely counterbleeding, of non-local compensatory lengthening in Modern Colloquial Persian, a style of informal speech in Iran (mostly in Tehran) motivated by moraic glottal consonants in the postconsonantal position in the coda. It concludes that building a moraic structure occurs before segmental changes, such as glottal deletion, Flop, and Spread (i.e., double flop), through weight-by-position. After building the moraic structure of coda consonants, a postconsonantal glottal is prone to deletion, resulting in a floating mora that precedes coda consonant flops while delinked from its mora. In this environment, stem vowels can spread to the neighboring mora and lengthen. Stratal OT is capable of accounting for counterbleeding through strata with different sets of OT constraints established on the basis of Persian morphology. The first stratum ensures the construction of the moraic structure before any segmental change, while the second stratum is where the counterbleeding order is covered.