THE SEMANTIC TRANSPARENCY HYPOTHESIS

Hooper initiates her exposition of the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis with a diagram, which is reprinted for convenience as (1):¹

Hooper gives an explanation of (1) that can be quickly exemplified as follows: The forms cat, foot are overt manifestations (X) of the Primitive Category (A) “(singular) noun.”² Cat+s and feet are manifestations (X+y) of the Secondary Category (A+b) “noun, plural.” In the expression “X+y,” “y” refers to some “mark,” e.g., the addition of the morpheme -s in cat+s, application of a non-automatic rule in foot/ feet. Crucially, the manifestly “marked” form is associated with the secondary semantic category rather than with the primary one.

Hooper realizes that the spirit (though not the letter) of the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis will be violated if a deletion rule is allowed to count as a “mark,” i.e., as a “y” in “X+y.” For example, the correlation of “marked” (resp. “unmarked”) overt form with “marked” (resp. “unmarked”) semantic category would be subverted if in some language plural nouns like zat were related by deletion to corresponding singular forms like zats.³ Hooper therefore proposes as a “refinement” of the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis the restriction on (1) that “y may be an M[orpho]P[honemic]-rule, e.g., Umlaut or G-insertion, but not a deletion rule.”

Hooper’s “refinement” runs into trouble immediately. Consider English present tense verb inflection. If third person singular is taken, as it generally is, to be the Primitive Category, then, for example, talks would be “X” in (1); and in the Secondary Category manifestation talk (=“X+y”), “X” would be talks and “y” would be a rule deleting -s. According to Hooper, “this analysis is wrong.” Presumably no one would disagree with this judgment. But we now face a dilemma: the deletion analysis of talk violates the “refinement” of (1)—and is wrong anyway—yet, as we know, the unrefined version of (1) does not permit the manifestation of the Primitive Category (talks) to be more complex, in the appropriate sense, than that of the Secondary Category (talk) . Hooper gets out of the dilemma by proposing a sort of fail-safe version of (1), which is reprinted as (2):

In the example at hand, then, “z” is the third singular marker -s of talks, and “y” is null. The relationship of (2) to (1) is that “(2) ... is preferable to (1) just in case (1) would require that y be a deletion rule.” We must apparently understand this to mean that if (1) does not require “y” to be a deletion rule, then (2) is not preferable to (1). That is, (1) and (2) are both valid, but the analyst (linguist or “real speaker”) appeals to (2) only if forced to in the situation just described. In other words, we can have our cake (1), and, in an emergency, eat it too (2).

The trouble with the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis as Hooper formulates it—as incorporating both (1) and (2), as described—is that its empirical content is left unclear. We are told about “y” only that it can represent null but it cannot refer to a deletion rule. Notice that this stipulation does not follow from (1) or (2) but rather must be stated separately. We are told absolutely nothing about “z.” Although Hooper provides a rich enough discursive context so that we can guess some of her intentions, the conditions that must be met by the terms in (1) and (2) are nowhere stated fully and explicitly. It is therefore simply wishful thinking to regard the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis as embodying a “substantive principle” of analysis or theory.⁴

Hooper’s decision to weaken (1) deserves another look. Faced with the dilemma mentioned above, she might in principle have taken a number of positions—the English verb-inflection example is an irrelevant anomaly, third person singular is not the relevant Primitive Category (a possibility mentioned in a footnote), the proposed “refinement” of (1) should be dropped, the version of the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis represented in (1) should be scrapped in favor of a radically different alternative, and so on. Among these and other imaginable alternatives, the incorporation of (2) into the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis is one of the least desirable choices, since it results in a weakening of the hypothesis. It is curious then that Hooper provides no clear explanation for her selection of just this move.

We have so far glossed over another conspicuous weakness of the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis, one which Hooper acknowledges. This is that much remains to be learned about the distinction between “Primitive” versus “Secondary” categories. Suffice it to say at this point that the extent to which the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis lacks content can be appreciated only when the lack of clarity regarding this distinction is coupled with the absence of information, mentioned just above, regarding conditions that must be met by the terms on the level of overt manifestation.

To summarize. The Semantic Transparency Hypothesis finds its roots, as Hooper tells us, in the work of Kurylowicz, Jakobson, and others (see HSP for bibliography). We owe Hooper a debt of gratitude for reminding us of this older work and of the relevance it may have for the current renascence of interest in morphology. I speculate that many linguists believe, as I do, that there is at least a grain of truth, and probably much more, in the notion “unmarked category” and related concepts. It is not obvious, however, that Hooper’s new formulations carry us beyond the work from which they take their inspiration.

MORPHOLOGICAL VERSUS PHONOLOGICAL CRITERIA

Fundamental to Hooper’s program is the distinction between what she terms “P-rules” and “MP-rules.”⁵ HSP repeatedly characterizes this distinction along the following lines: “Phonetically motivated processes [=P-rules] are controlled by the physical facts of production (and perhaps perception), while morpho-syntactically motivated processes [=MP-rules] are governed by the cognitive and psychological processes that create meaning” P-rules “are all ‘natural,’ by which I mean they are all phonetically explainable synchronically”, while “MP-rules are conditioned by semantic categories, [and] the principles which guide their formulation should be based on semantics not on phonology.”

Before proceeding, a caveat is in order regarding Hooper’s insistent use of such words as “meaning” and “semantic.” Like the rest of us, she tends to use these terms to form a rubbish bin for anything that is hard to label otherwise. It is of course not Hooper’s fault that there exists today no well-supported semantic theory and consequently no explicated content to the words “meaning,” “semantic,” etc. It is nonetheless extremely destructive to Hooper’s enterprise that she has couched her basic propositions in such vague terms. This much is clear: whatever “semantic,” etc., may ultimately turn out to be, Hooper does not use these words in HSP with the same intended referents they have in work that is generally taken to constitute the serious literature of semantics. In fact, so far as I can see, Hooper’s “semantic” and “meaning based” could be replaced in nearly every instance by “morpho-syntactic” or simply “formal,” with no loss of precision.

With this in mind, in order to appreciate the relation of the distinction at issue to the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis, we turn to a direct examination of all of the major examples given in HSP as illustration and support of Hooper’s contentions

and that

Hooper’s first major example illustrates that “there is no point in seeking phonologically motivated generalizations and explanations for MP-rules in a synchronic grammar”. She uses the “well-worked examples” of stem-vowel alternations in Spanish verbs, e.g., contár/ cuénto ‘count’, mentír/miénto/mintió ‘lie’, pedir/pído ‘request’. It is well known that the distribution of these alternations is “lexically arbitrary,” as Hooper states, in the sense that it is quite unpredictable which verbs alternate this way and which don’t. It should be equally clear that “semantics” or “meaning,” whatever these are, play no role at all, and that morphological information is relevant only in the case of the alternation of high vowels with mid, not in the case of alternations involving the diphthongs ue and ie.⁶ Indeed, the MP-rule which Hooper herself formulates for these alternations (Hooper 1976:159, rule (29)) is stated ENTIRELY in phonological terms, e.g., stress, vowel height, syllabicity. It seems then that Hooper is failing to distinguish LEXICAL conditions, which are relevant in this example, from MORPHOLOGICAL conditions, which are partially relevant, and SEMANTIC conditions, which are totally irrelevant. In sum, Hooper’s own recent descriptive practice is not in accord with the principles suggested in the passage quoted just above. I do not wish to speculate how Hooper might resolve this discrepancy, but it is difficult to imagine how any generalizations concerning the data at hand could be related to “principles based on meaning” or “semantic categories.”

Hooper’s next example is also from Spanish and is adduced to provide further exemplification of the fact that “morphologically-conditioned rules are phonologically arbitrary, and that phonological considerations may play no role at all in their formulation.” The data are the alternations illustrated in sets of forms like comér/comémos/comímos/comiéron/come (all forms of the stem meaning ‘eat’) and vivír/viviémos/viviéron/víve (‘live’). Hooper cites the analysis of these alternations in Brame and Bordelois 1974 as an instance of illicit use of phonological considerations. When one looks at the rules Brame and Bordelois actually wrote, however, we see that they appeal to such morphological properties as [+ 3 conj], [+ theme], [+ S], [— present], in addition to the phonological properties “vowel,” [— low], [+ high], [— stress], and so on. Hooper has written a rule to cover exactly the same alternations (1976:156, rule L), so that a comparison is available. We see that her rule appeals to such morphological properties as [— 3rd conj], [Th(eme) V(owel)], [present], and to phonological properties such as “vowel,” [— low], [+ high], [— stress]. It is not obvious in what sense either of these analyses is any more or any less dependent on “phonological considerations” or “conditioned by semantic categories” than the other. There is an issue here, however, as examination of Brame and Bordelois 1974 shows, namely the question of to what degree formal abbreviatory notational devices can be employed to conflate the statement of phonological generalizations with the statement of morphological generalizations. But Hooper’s presentation tends to obfuscate this issue rather than to clarify it, and this is not the place to pursue the matter.

Another example from Spanish, examined at some length from both synchronic and diachronie perspectives, purports to illustrate how the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis makes the correct choice of a morphologically based analysis over a phonologically based analysis of identical material. The data are sets of verb forms like po [n]e (indicative) /po [ŋg]a (subjunctive) ‘put’, and cre [s]e (indie.) /cre[sk]a (subj.) ‘grow’. The question is: which is correct, a phonologically based analysis in which the velars g, k are deleted in indicative po [n]e, cre[s] e or a putatively meaning-based analysis in which g, k are inserted in subjunctive po [ŋg]a, cre[sk]a?⁷ On the basis of the history of these forms, Hooper argues that in a synchronic analysis of the modern language, the velars must be inserted in po [r\g]a, cre[sk]a, etc., rather than deleted in po [n]e, cre[s]e, etc. I think that this conclusion is correct and inescapable. Hooper also states, however, that the (incorrect) deletion analysis is “clearly the best analysis using phonological criteria.” This is false. In Harris 1972 I gave a detailed argument showing that deletion analyses of the data in question are untenable.⁸ Crucially, my arguments in favor of insertion over deletion were based entirely on phonological considerations. Since, therefore, the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis is not uniquely successful in predicting the correctness of insertion, this example contributes nothing one way or the other to the question at hand.

Hooper’s final major example deals with vowel alterations in Portuguese verb forms.⁹ This material is said to “illustrate clearly” that the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis reflects a strategy actually used in language acquisition. The developmental data cited do indeed suggest, as Hooper claims, an order of acquisition that is consistent with predictions derivable from the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis. This fact is not uninteresting but it shows very little if any useful degree of specificity. It could hardly fail to be the case that many acquisition strategies are consistent with something whose empirical content is as vague as that of the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis, as Hooper has refined it.

Hooper’s further claims relating to the Portuguese material are more serious. She states that “until evidence appears which shows that the acquisition process includes a total revision of the child’s underlying forms and rules before adulthood, so that child and adult grammars differ radically, we can hypothesize that adult grammars, like child grammars, are based on the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis.” The considerable developmental literature accumulated over the last decades suggests that the acquisition process involves a series of successive approximations to adult grammars, and that some adjacent stages involve discontinuities that might well be characterized as “radical.” Be this as it may, to proceed as Hooper seems to suggest would be heuristically disastrous, since it would simply guarantee that if child and adult grammars do differ radically, we would never discover this fact. A less dogmatic and heuristically more valuable procedure would be to approach the study of adult grammars unencumbered by strong preconceptions regarding the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis and child grammars. This way we stand a chance of finding out what their interrelationships actually are.

From what I have presented so far, the reader might well conclude that Hooper’s so-called substantive principles regarding phonological and morphological criteria in linguistic analysis reduce to the quasitautology that we should write rules with phonological environments where phonological conditions are relevant, and we should write rules with morphological environments where morphological conditions are relevant. Such a conclusion, however, would be in error. I have kept in reserve Hooper’s interesting and provocative “hypothesis that speakers, when presented with a choice, will prefer to construct a morphologically motivated analysis over a purely phonological analysis.” The expression “when presented with a choice” refers to a situation in which it is impossible to determine on the basis of primary data alone whether phonological or morphological conditions are operative. The linguist’s analog of this hypothesis is a “general principle that should guide synchronic analyses of morphologically motivated alternations even where additional substantive evidence is not available.”¹⁰ It goes without saying that these proposals are very interesting. There is some reason to believe, however, that they are too strong. I will give one example from Spanish, where the primary data are clear beyond the point of controversy. In standard dialects, the marker of imperfective aspect in past-tense verb forms is /ba/ in some forms and /a/ in others, for example:

Is the alternative ba ~ a phonologically or morphologically determined? The primary data are ambiguous, since the two types of conditioning factors are absolutely coextensive: in the first conjugation (morphological condition) the imperfective marker is always preceded by the low syllabic [a] (phonological condition); in other conjugations (morphological condition) the imperfective marker is always preceded by the high front syllabic [i] (phonological condition). Either of the rules (4a), (4b) will work:¹¹

(4) a. b → Ø / [- 1 conj] +

b. b → Ø / [i] +

Hooper’s principle says that linguists, like “real speakers,” must prefer (4a), the morphologically conditioned rule. But now consider how forms like those illustrated in (3) have evolved in the dialect of San Antonito, a small town in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico:¹²

Standard ca [i]a has become cá [y]ba; similarly, tra [i]a ‘brought’ has become trá [y]ba. These are the only second conjugation stems in which the low vowel [a] precedes the pre-inflectional segment, and this segment has lost its syllabicity—an unremarkable phonological adjustment. Remarkably, along with this phonological adjustment, the imperfective marker has become /ba/. This suggests that the allomorphy ba ~ a of the imperfective marker is NOT controlled by morphological conditions—the stems of câ [y]ba and tra [y]ba do not cease to belong to the second conjugation, as is shown by forms in other paradigms—but rather by phonological conditions. Specifically, the allomorph /ba/ appears in these forms, in accordance with rule (4b) (or (ii)) of note 11), because it is preceded by non-syllabic [y] rather than by syllabic [i]. In sum, unless there is something wrong with this example, and its simplicity makes it hard to imagine what this might be, Hooper’s principle makes the wrong prediction. The generation of “real speakers” that initiated the San Antonito innovation must have analyzed the ambiguous primary data illustrated in (3) according to phonological rather than morphological criteria.

Of course there are, just as Hooper claims, cases in which language change does appear to follow Hooper’s principle. What remains to be discovered is what revision of this principle, or what other principle, makes the correct prediction in every case.

SUBSTANTIVE PRINCIPLES OF PHONOLOGY

Hooper states that the “major claim of natural generative phonology is that speakers construct only generalizations that are surface-true and transparent.” This claim is expressed in a principle known as the “True Generalization Condition,” which “is meant to apply to MP-rules just as it applies to P-rules.” Hooper does not provide an explicit statement of the True Generalization Condition in HSP, or, to the best of my knowledge, anywhere else. Thus if we are to attempt to understand the True Generalization Condition, we must turn to examples of its application, one of the most striking of which is found in Chapter 13 of Hooper 1976.

This example involves the well-known “epenthetic e” of Spanish, which is generally believed to be inserted under the conditions specified in (6).

(6) Ø → e / #_______s [+ consonantal]

This epenthesis process is phonologically governed, totally general, exceptionless, and extraordinarily hard to learn to suppress in foreign language acquisition. One would think it to be a perfect exemplar of a P-rule, in Hooper’s terms. Yet rule (6) is excluded by the True Generalization Condition “because the rule requires that ALL [word-initial] sequences of /s/ + C have to be preceded by /e/” (1976:234). In other words, the True Generalization Condition requires that P-rules be biconditionally transparent, so to speak. But Spanish has countless words with a vowel other than e before initial sC, e.g. astro, usted, hospital [ospital]. Consequently rule (6) does not meet the biconditional requirement of the True Generalization Condition and is not a possible rule. As a result, in Hooper’s natural generative phonological theory, “all [Spanish] words with initial /esC/ are entered in the lexicon with the /e/ present” (1976:234).¹³ I underscore: the True Generalization Condition requires that there be no level of representation in which the so-called epenthetic e’s are not present.

Consider the consequences of this requirement for the (extremely productive) morphological process of diminutive formation in Spanish. Two of the allomorphs of the diminutive suffix are distributed, in some dialects, according to the number of syllables of the base word, in certain classes of words. For example:

How can the apparently bizarre array of data in (8) be accounted for? One especially attractive description is based on the fact that words like estudio and espacio, though phonetically trisyllabic [es-tu-δyo] and [es-pa-syo], count as disyllabic for diminutive formation. More specifically, diminutive formation “looks at” the representations stu-dyo and spa-syo which lack the epenthetic e supplied by rule (6). But these representations and this rule are disallowed by the True Generalization Condition, as we have seen. The True Generalization Condition thus disallows a description which is not only attractive but is in fact the only non-ad hoc one that is likely to exist for data pertaining to one of the most productive word-formation processes found in any language. This fact should not be lightly dismissed in evaluating the True Generalization Condition.

EPILOGUE

These observations have been extremely critical of HSP. Such is the task, unpleasant though it may be, of an assigned “discussant,” a sort of hired gun.

It should be clear that my criticisms have been directed largely at the quality of evidence and argumentation in HSP. I have nowhere intended to suggest that the “unmarked category” principle (of which the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis is a version) does not merit study, that there is no linguistically significant difference between phonologically and morphologically based generalizations, or that there exist no substantive universal principles of phonology. It is precisely because the issues involved are so important that we should expect arguments concerning them to be able to withstand the severest scrutiny. Although this expectation is sometimes disappointed in HSP, Hooper has to be commended for so persistently and effectively forcing us to reexamine and reevaluate time and again our most fundamental assumptions regarding the phonology and morphology of human languages.

NOTES

1. This formulation is taken from Baxter 1975, which Hooper characterizes as “the most comprehensive treatment of morphology in the framework we are working in here.” I have not seen Baxter 1975, and thus rely entirely on HSP.

2. We glide over the question of whether the Primitive Category is, strictly speaking, “singular,” “noun,” “singular noun,” or something else.

3. I provide a hypothetical example here because Hooper provides no allegedly correct one, hypothetical or real.

Bear in mind that the prohibition against deriving the manifestation of the Primitive Category (e.g. English cat) from that of the Secondary Category (e.g. cats) by deletion is already built into (1). Thus (1) excludes, for example, Bloomfield’s (1933:217) analysis of French adjectives in which masculine (presumably the more basic semantic category), e.g., petit [peti], are derived by a “minus-feature” from feminines, e.g., petite [petit].

4. See also note 11.

5. There is considerable elaboration of the P-rule/MP-rule dichotomy in Hooper 1976.

6. Fuller discussion can be found in a number of sources, the most recent of which is Harris 1978.

7. Hooper seems to attribute the deletion rule she gives to Foley 1965. I am unable to find any such rule in my copy of Foley 1965. I find instead an analysis in which the velar of cre[sk]e becomes t⁸ because of the following front vowel, the resulting [st^s], becomes [ss], which becomes (long) [s], which becomes [s], giving cre [s]e. In any event, to refer to the sequence [sk]→...→[s] as “deletion” is innocuous in the present context.

8. I argued specifically against the analyses of Foley 1965 and Saporta 1965, but it seems clear that the argument generalizes easily to any deletion analysis.

9. Hooper’s discussion of the primary linguistic data and of the analysis in Harris 1974 is somewhat out of focus. This is not the place, however, to clarify the facts of Portuguese, nor do I have any desire to defend particular details of Harris 1974. Redenbarger 1977 suggests, at the very least, that this study needs thorough reevaluation, but for reasons and in ways that have nothing to do with Hooper’s arguments.

10. Inclusion of the words “morphologically motivated” begs the question at issue. Let us overlook this. What Hooper obviously means is that the linguist should always choose morphological over phonological conditions when the data are ambiguous.

11. Of course if morphophonological deletion rules are disallowed as Hooper proposes, (4a), (4b) have to be restated. This might be done in a number of ways. Following Hooper (1976:155, rule G) closely, let us propose (i) and (ii), respectively.

The choice of (4a,b) versus (i), (ii) has nothing to do with the main thread of the argument at this point. It does, however, speak to the question of the adequacy of the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis. In the case at hand, which is the more marked overt manifestation, /ba/ or /a/? How can these realizations be associated with either a primitive or a secondary semantic category, since there is only one category, namely, imperfective aspect? The Semantic Transparency Hypothesis should presumably illuminate these questions, but it is difficult to see how Hooper’s formulation of it even bears on the data under discussion.

12. Data from Bowen 1976.

13. Hooper does not explore what this treatment entails for alternating morphemes, as in checoslovaco but eslovaco, inscribir but escribir, etc.

14. Saurio is dissyllabic: [saw-ryo]. Thanks to Osvaldo Jaeggli for the nice example saurio/ dinosaurio and for confirming the acceptability judgment in (7) and (8).

Incidentally, examples like those in (7) and (8) show that Hooper and Terrell 1976 grossly underestimates the complexity of diminutive formation in Spanish.