What’s a theory to do?
I don’t read Mr. Verb regularly, but I really should. On occasion, he’ll slip into a “moment of theoretical linguistic seriousness” of the kind that we (well, I) attempt to maintain consistently here at phonoloblog (ahem). Case in point: a post from a couple months ago on phonological opacity, following up on a reader’s questions about something mentioned in passing in this post. (Hat-tip to Ed.) The post on opacity concludes:
In any monostratal theory (one without stages of derivation), getting these interactions is a huge problem. This isn’t the place to run through them, but some readers will be familiar with sympathy theory, comparative markedness, and so on. I heard one person sum it up this way a few years ago:
Opacity is ubiquitous in human language, and earlier theories of phonology could deal with it easily. It’s hard to see why those advantages have been abandoned for an approach that can’t handle opacity without lots of gymnastics, if at all, for benefits that don’t look all that great.
(I’m pretty sure that it’s safe to assume that “earlier theories of phonology” refers to serial, rule-based generative phonology in the SPE-and-subsequent-developments sense, and that “any monostratal theory (one without stages of derivation)” and “an approach that can’t handle opacity without lots of gymnastics, if at all” refers to Optimality Theory. Correct me if I’m wrong.)
I’m not going to contest the ubiquitousness of opacity in human language claim, having recently written an article assuming this to be true (appeared in Phonology 24.2, 217-259). I’ll also assume that we can all agree on the legitimacy of at least some examples of opacity, in the sense that we agree that such cases involve the interaction of synchronic phonological processes (pace Sanders on ’synchronic’ and Green on ‘phonological’). But I would like to challenge Mr. Verb (and the quoted summer-upper) to defend (some of) the remaining claims, explicit and implicit, made in what I’ve quoted above. Here is a list of what I take those claims to be.
- OT is by definition monostratal.
- OT requires “lots of gymnastics” to account for opacity, while SPE doesn’t.
- SPE(-and-subsequent-developments) “could deal with [opacity] easily”.
- The benefits of OT over SPE “don’t look all that great”.
More commentary on each of these below the fold.
