Shifting Interactions and Countershifting Opacity: A Note on Opacity in Harmonic Serialism

This squib proposes to extend the traditional taxonomy of pairwise process interactions (which contains “feeding,” “bleeding,” “counterfeeding,” and “counterbleeding”) to include the classes “shifting” and “countershifting.” A process “shifts” another if it does not feed or bleed it but rather causes it to apply in a different way. “Countershifting” is the opaque counterfactual inverse of shifting, and it fills a terminological gap identified by Kiparsky (2015). The class of countershifting interactions is claimed to be theoretically significant: Harmonic Serialism is able to apply the opaque process in countershifting interactions but generally not in counterfeeding or counterbleeding.