Sympathy, comparative markedness, OT-CC and Latin syncope

Abstract

This paper focuses on opaque Latin vowel deletion and its relevance to the actual theoretical debate of dealing with opacity in OT. Besides derivational OT, three parallel OT approaches to deal with opacity in OT are discussed: Sympathy Theory (McCarthy 1999 and 2003), Comparative Markedness (McCarthy 2002) and OT with Candidate Chains (McCarthy 2007). It is argued that Sympathy Theory, for principled reasons, is unable to deal with opaque Latin vowel deletion. The main reason is that the opacity in this case crucially depends on the prosody and not on faithfulness. Comparative Markedness can account for opaque syncope by splitting up the constraints Parse -σ and Ft - Bin in new ( N Parse -σ and N Ft - Bin ) and old ( O Parse -σ and O Ft - Bin ) constraints. However, the ranking necessary to deal with the cases of opaque deletion leads to incorrect outputs in cases of transparent deletion. Finally, OT with Candidate Chains will be shown to allow for a more restrictive and more principled account of opaque syncope than a serial, level OT approach.