Opacity in Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains

This study points out some problems with McCarthy (2006) s Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC for short). An attempt to overcome a quandary of opacity due to admitting no intermediate forms in the classic OT (McCarthy & Prince 1993), OT-CC employs derivations as a third representation in the form of candidate chains, where intermediate forms are arranged in a sequence of minimal divergence and harmonic improvement. However, there are several problems in the analysis of opacity in the framework of OT-CC, coming from lack of explicitness and restrictiveness. Most of the problems are concerned with the newly introduced precedence constraints, which stipulate the violation order of faithfulness constraints. Being neither faithfulness nor markedness constraints, the property of precedence constraints is in doubt, while their ranking relation in the light of the meta-ranking B >> Prec(A, B) is found to be inconsistent and thus in need of revision. Gradual divergence and harmonic improvement, two of the three well-formedness conditions of candidate chains, also need clarifying since the relevant information in the tableaux in OT-CC is not formally and explicitly specified.