Blurb:

This book contributes to the research on contrast by providing a framework of contrast and investigating its empirical coverage.
The proposal developed in this book finds its inspiration in the work on opacity and recoverability in the 1970s. The main idea expressed in those works is that input representations should be recoverable from the surface forms in the language, and opaque phonological processes increase recoverability (see Donegan and Stampe 1979, Gussmann 1976, Hualde 1990, Kaye 1974, 1975, and Kisseberth 1976). The theory of contrast developed in this book, called PC theory, follows this insightful observation about opaque phonological processes and incorporates it into a framework of rankable and violable constraints.