Lexical and Postlexical Phonology in Optimality Theory: Evidence from Japanese

要旨

A characteristic feature of conservative varieties of Tokyo Japanese (Hibiya 1999) is the interaction of a morphophonemic process of compound voicing with a general allophonic process of g-weakening. Given the current interest in parallelist approaches to the masking of certain phonological generalizations on the surface (dubbed “opacity ” in Kiparsky 1973), the immediate goal of this paper is to demonstrate that this interaction represents a type of opacity that cannot be described in an adequate way by means of Sympathy (McCarthy 1998), which has been suggested as a general and strictly parallelist tool to deal with all types of opacity in Optimality Theory (henceforth, OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993). Mistakenly put forth as an argument for Sympathy in our own earlier work (Ito & Mester 1997b) the case receives a superior understanding under familiar conservative assumptions, where the opacity arises naturally out of the serial interaction of the lexical and postlexical modules of phonology. Construed more broadly, this result constitutes an additional argument for the weakly parallel architecture of Optimality Theory argued for in Ito & Mester (to appear a,b), which maintains lexical and postlexical phonology as different and serially connected systems, without necessarily embracing the entirely separate assumption of serially connected levels within the lexical phonology itself argued for by Kiparsky 1998.

主題