On August 19th, Yeong-Joon Kim brilliantly and successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Phonetic faithfulness in phonological opacity”! Congratulations, Yeong-Joon!!
Here’s the abstract:
This dissertation presents a novel approach to phonological opacity, which is grounded in new findings regarding substantive restrictions on the patterns of opaque interactions. The central thesis posits that phonological opacity functions to preserve the phonetic properties specified in the input of a phonological operation. Specifically, it argues that inputs are enriched with phonetic auditory features, and surface opacity emerges as a result of processing these enriched inputs. This proposal can be detailed as follows. First, processes that become opaque are initially biased by certain phonetic markedness conditions. Second, these phonetic biases, encoded in the phonetically enriched inputs, are mapped onto the nearest phonologically contrastive sounds to satisfy the requirement of phonetic faithfulness, resulting in surface phonological opacity.
This hypothesis yields a testable prediction: only phonetically natural processes, which possess an appropriate phonetic markedness condition, can become opaque. The results of typological surveys of 87 counterfeeding and 65 counterbleeding interactions across languages support this prediction, revealing that opacified processes are subject to a narrow range of markedness conditions, such as coarticulatory assimilation (e.g., palatalization) and durational adjustments (e.g., segmental weakening). Other types of phonological processes, particularly non-natural ones, which are unlikely to have appropriate phonetic markedness conditions, are rarely, if ever, opacified. This asymmetry in the patterns of phonological opacity underscores that opaque interactions are not independent of phonetic substance.In addition to this main finding, it is also shown that the current proposal offers additional advantages in explaining phonological opacity. First, it successfully accounts for various non-typical opaque interactions, such as feeding opacity and stress misapplications, alongside counterfeeding and counterbleeding interactions. The proposal also integrates various phonological phenomena, such as compensatory lengthening, coalescence, and incomplete neutralization, within the framework. Second, the proposed model suggests that learners can successfully acquire and reproduce opaque patterns. Learning simulations using a weighted constraint version of the proposed model demonstrate that intermediate hidden structures, such as phonetically enriched inputs, can be learned based solely on surface patterns when the mappings between abstract inputs and surface representations are known. This challenges the conventional notion that opaque patterns are more difficult to learn than transparent phonology.
