Quasi-opacity and headed spans in Silly and Megisti Greek. Paper presented at the Manchester Phonology Meeting

Abstract: A number of Greek dialects developed a phonological process very similar to Vowel Harmony (VH) due to a long period of contact with Turkish. In this paper, we focus on Silly (Asia Minor Greek) and Megisti (Southern Greek), hitherto unknown in the literature, in order to study the interaction between VH and epenthesis. This interaction poses a puzzle for surface-based accounts of phonology since it looks opaque. We propose that no extra theoretical devices – such as Comparative Markedness, Output-Output Correspondence or Sympathy – are needed to account for these phenomena, once we accept appropriate theories of phonological representations and extend the notion of CONTAINMENT (Prince & Smolensky 1993) to the phonology-morphology interaction. One of the central issues of discussion within Optimality Theory over the past few years has been the proper description of opacity. Various theoretical devices have been proposed over the years, but none of them has met general acceptance