Earticle

The recent OT-alternative, OT-CC, has been proposed to explain phonological opacity, marking traces of phonological alternations in its intermediate forms. Although the theory successfully accounts for patterns of opacity phonology and can readily extend to other data with chains involving intermediate forms, the theory reveals some fatal problems with regard to one of its three major conditions, gradual divergence. For instance, the notion of gradual divergence fails to explain cases of insertion of a place-linked vowel, nasalization of the placeless obstruent and nasalization of an oral stop, all of which incur more than two LUMs at a time. Given that such violations of gradualness are unavoidable when dealing with these cases of phonological alternations, this paper proposes to incorporate radical and contrastive underspecification into OT-CC despite their very limited roles in the development of constraint-based approaches.