earticle

영어

Opacity phenomena defy an easy and systematic explanation in OT. There have been a considerable number of proposals to attempt to incorporate the opacity in OT but each of the proposals was criticized by others. The most recent proposal by McCarthy, OT-CC with precedence constraints, though fairly elaborate and complicated, still has its own problems. This paper revises the OT-CC and introduces Gradual Harmony instead of the original proposal, Precedence Constraint, and limits its application to the overapplication opacity. The basic claim is that the underapplication opacity can be explained with the local constraint conjunction and the overapplication opacity can be dealt with with the ban on the radical harmonic improvement. Though two different approaches are adopted for overapplication and underapplication opacities, one thing in common between them is that opacity blocks radical departure from the input. The underapplication bans the violation of two or more faithful constraints in a given domain and the overapplication is to block two simultaneous satisfaction of markedness constraints in a single step.