Opaque Interactions Research Articles

Canadian Raising, Opacity, and Rephonemicization

AbstractCanadian Raising—the phonetic changes in vowel quality and quantity in the diphthongs /ai/ and/ au/ before voiceless consonants—has been of considerable importance to phonological theories ever since Joos (1975). The opaque interaction of Canadian Raising and flapping in words such aswriterconsitutes one of the main arguments for rule ordering in phonology (Chomsky and Halle 1968; Chambers 1975). Recently, Mielke, Armstrong, and Hume (2003) have challenged Joos’s phonemic splitting analysis and have argued that Canadian Raising, rather than being a productive phonological process, is a static lexicalized generalization implemented as a choice between allomorphic variants. A rebuttal to this allomorphic analysis is offered based on evidence that, for some speakers, Canadian Raising productively applies in novel morphological contexts, in language games, and in the phrasal phonology, none of which are amenable to an allomorphic analysis.

Variation and Opacity

Phonological variation and phonological opacity have been extensively studied independently of each other. This paper examines two phonological processes that simultaneously exhibit both phenomena: Assibilation and Apocope in Finnish. The evidence converges on two main conclusions. First, variation results from the presence of multiple metrical systems within Finnish. Assibilation and Apocope are metrically conditioned alternations and the segmental variation reflects metrical variation. The metrical analysis explains a number of apparently unrelated phenomena, including typological asymmetries across dialects, quantitative asymmetries within dialects, differences between nouns and verbs, differences among noun classes, and the loci of lexical frequency effects. Second, phonological opacity arises from morphological level ordering. By interleaving transparent phonologies with independently motivated morphosyntactic constituents (stems, words, phrases) we derive the transparent and opaque interactions of four phonological processes, including Assibilation and Apocope.