Preface; Acknowledgments;1.Introduction; Overview; Neutral Segments and Representations; Optimality Theory; Organization of the Dissertation; 2.A Cross-linguistic Typology of Nasal Harmony Hierarchical Variation in Nasal Harmony; Analysis of the Typology; The Status of 'Transparent Glottals; Interaction of the Hierarchy with Multiple Constraints; Appendix: The Nasal Harmony Database; 3. Segmental Transparency as an Opacity Effect; Antagonistic Transparency; Opacity in Tiberian Hebrew; Tuyuca; Some Points of Comparison between Harmonic and Contraint-based Sympathy; Finnish; An Evaluation Metric for Opacity; Appendix: German and Harmonic Sympathy Revisited; 4. A Phonetic Study of Guarani ; Nasal Harmony in Guarani; Set-up; Results; Discussion; Two-burst Events; Appendix: Word Pairs; 5. Other Proposals A Gapping Alternative; The Variable Dependency Hypothesis; Other Approaches to Segmental Transparency; 6. Other Phenomena: Reduplication and Cooccurrence Restrictions; Reduplication in Mbe; Coocurrence Effects in Bantu; Bibliography; Index.