Constraint combinations and phonological opacity

Abstract

This paper presents an extensive explanation to opacity, which represents one of the most recalcitrant problems in Optimality theory. The research history of opacity in Optimality theory is that of gradual departure from its original proposal. The recent proposal of OT-CC by McCarthy virtually gives up the idea of parallelism and argues for the importance of derivational history. This paper, however, reviews the opacity problems and offers an alternative explanation without abandoning parallelism. This paper makes use of constraint combinations to explain both underapplication opacity and overapplication opacity. It cites various papers to show that the underapplication opacity is the work of disjunctively combined complex constraint. Based on such constraint combinations, it further argues that the overapplication opacity is also the work of a combined constraint. The complex constraint with implicational combination and its interaction with relevant constraints can explain the overapplication opacity. As such, this paper shows that we can deal with opacity issues in Optimality without introducing derivational history or constraints that do not fall into either markedness or faithfulness constraint family.