Opacity and ordering

Eric Baković, University of California, San Diego

Abstract

The resurgence of research on phonological opacity over the past fifteen years or so has unfortunately not paid attention to the substantive questions of learnability raised by Kiparsky’s original hypothesis; opacity has instead been wielded as a weapon in the larger debate between proponents of rule-based serialism and proponents of alternative theoretical frameworks, Optimality Theory in particular. The debate has been sharply polarized in most respects, but there is one mistaken ‘fact’ on which nearly all researchers on both sides mysteriously appear to have decided to agree: that rule-based serialism, via its central principle of rule ordering, uniquely offers a unified account of opacity as originally defined by Kiparsky. I demonstrate in this paper that it is not even the case that rule-based serialism “treats [opacity] as a unified phenomenon” (Vaux 2008), unless we decide to depart from Kiparsky’s agreed-upon definition of opacity and instead stipulatively (and perversely) define it as just those opaque interactions that can be described with rule ordering. Further discussions of the implications of opacity for theoretical framework comparison should either acknowledge this or provide a new, principled definition of opacity on which to base such discussions.