scholarly journals Serial Markedness Reduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaja Jarosz
Keyword(s):  
General Solution ◽  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Restricted Range ◽  
Harmonic Serialism ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Phonological Opacity

<p class="Phon-Paragraph">A growing body of research provides evidence supporting Harmonic Serialism (HS; McCarthy 2000, 2008a, 2010; Elfner to appear; Pruitt 2010), a serial version of Optimality Theory in which a single ranking of constraints is used iteratively to construct a derivation. This work has led to new insights into several outstanding problems in phonology and has highlighted problematic over-predictions of parallel OT, showing that HS predicts a more restricted range of interactions that better reflects typology. Although HS makes it possible to capture certain generalizations stated at intermediate levels of representation, it does not provide a general solution to phonological opacity. For this reason McCarthy developed a significant elaboration of HS, OT with Candidate Chains (OT-CC; McCarthy 2007), which evaluates complete HS-like derivations in parallel. This paper proposes a novel extension of HS, Serial Markedness Reduction (SMR), which combines advantages of HS and OT-CC. Like OT-CC, SMR includes a family of constraints that enables the modeling of both counterfeeding and counterbleeding opacity. However, SMR significantly streamlines the machinery necessary to model opacity as compared to OT-CC, relying on the gradual optimization inherent to HS to construct a single optimal derivation. The formal and empirical differences between OT-CC and SMR are discussed.</p><p> </p>

Serialism and locality in constraint-based metrical parsing

Phonology ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Pruitt
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Standard Theory ◽  
Metrical Structure ◽  
Local Interactions ◽  
Local Systems ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Harmonic Serialism ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Constraint Ranking

This paper proposes a model of stress assignment in which metrical structure is built serially, one foot at a time, in a series of Optimality Theory (OT)-style evaluations. Iterative foot optimisation is made possible in the framework of Harmonic Serialism, which defines the path from an input to an output with a series of gradual changes in which each form improves harmony relative to a constraint ranking. Iterative foot optimisation makes the strong prediction that decisions about metrical structure are made locally, matching attested typology, while the standard theory of stress in parallel OT predicts in addition to local systems unattested stress systems with non-local interactions. The predictions of iterative foot optimisation and parallel OT are compared, focusing on the interactions of metrical parsing with syllable weight, vowel shortening and constraints on the edges of prosodic domains.

scholarly journals Moraic coda sonority in Chilean Spanish

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nate Shaftoe
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Harmonic Serialism ◽  
Moraic Theory ◽  
Chilean Spanish

This paper discusses coda lenition phenomena in Chilean Spanish, seeking to create a unified analysis for coda obstruent gliding and /s/-reduction. The paper invokes Moraic Theory to motivate lenition of certain segments in coda position. Using Harmonic Serialism, a serial variant of Optimality Theory, Chilean Spanish is shown to have a minimum sonority requirement on coda segments, and lenites insufficiently sonorous segments. /s/ is shown to place-delete to [h] to avoid sonority restrictions. The lack of /ʔ/ causes obstruents to diverge their derivation from that of /s/. Lenition to glottal segments is preferred, but gliding occurs if this is impossible.

Domain modelling in Optimality Theory: Morphophonological cyclicity vs. stepwise prosodic parsing

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-43
Author(s):  
KAROLINA BROŚ
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Input String ◽  
Domain Specificity ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Phonological Processes ◽  
Structure Building ◽  
Harmonic Serialism ◽  
Chilean Spanish ◽  
Insight Into

This paper examines opaque examples of phrase-level phonology taken from Chilean Spanish under the framework of Stratal Optimality Theory (OT) (Rubach 1997; Bermúdez-Otero 2003, 2019) and Harmonic Serialism (HS) (McCarthy 2008a, b, 2016). The data show an interesting double repair of the coda /s/ taking place at word edges. It is argued that Stratal OT is superior in modelling phonological processes that take place at the interface between morphology and phonology because it embraces cyclicity. Under this model, prosodic structure is built serially, level by level, and in accordance with the morphological structure of the input string. In this way, opacity at constituent edges can be solved. Stratal OT also provides insight into word-internal morphological structure and the domain-specificity of phonological processes. It is demonstrated that a distinction in this model is necessary between the word and the phrase levels, and between the stem and the word levels. As illustrated by the behaviour of Spanish nouns, affixation and the resultant alternations inform us about the domains to which both morphological and phonological processes should be assigned. Against this background, Harmonic Serialism embraces an apparently simpler recursive mechanism in which stepwise prosodic parsing can be incorporated. What is more, it offers insight into the nature of operations in OT, as well as into such problematic issues as structure building and directionality. Nevertheless, despite the model’s ability to solve various cases of opacity, the need to distinguish between two competing repairs makes HS fail when confronted with the Chilean data under examination.

scholarly journals Opacity in Tiberian Hebrew: morphology, not phonology

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 37-70
Author(s):  
Antony D. Green
Keyword(s):  
Research Program ◽  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Phonological Processes ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Paradigm Uniformity ◽  
Phonological Opacity

The phenomenon of phonological opacity has been the subject of much debate in recent years, with scholars opposed to the Optimality Theory (OT) research program arguing that opacity proves OT must be false, while the solutions proposed within OT, such as sympathy theory and stratal OT , have proved to be unsatisfying to many OT proponents, who have found these proposals to be inconsistent with the parallelist approach to phonological processes otherwise characteristic of OT. In this paper I reexamine one of the best known cases of opacity, that found in three processes of Tiberian Hebrew (TH), and argue that these processes only appear to be opaque, because previous analyses have treated them as pure phonology, rather than as an interaction between phonology and morphology. Once it is recognized that certain words of TH are lexically marked to end with a syllabic trochee, and that the goal of paradigm uniformity exerts grammatical pressure on phonology, the three processes no longer present a problem to parallelist OT. The results suggest the possibility that all crosslinguistic instances of apparent opacity can be explained in terms of the phonology-morphology interface and that purely phonological opacity does not exist. If this claim is true, then parallelist OT can be defended against its detractors without the need for additional mechanisms like sympathy theory and stratal OT.  

scholarly journals The gradual path to cluster simplification

Phonology ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Consonant Cluster ◽  
Surface Representation ◽  
Underlying Representation ◽  
Harmonic Serialism ◽  
Final Output ◽  
Place Assimilation

When a medial consonant cluster is simplified by deletion or place assimilation, the first consonant is affected, but never the second one: /patka/ becomes [paka] and not *[pata]; /panpa/ becomes [pampa] and not [panta]. This article accounts for that observation within a derivational version of Optimality Theory called Harmonic Serialism. In Harmonic Serialism, the final output is reached by a series of derivational steps that gradually improve harmony. If there is no gradual, harmonically improving path from a given underlying representation to a given surface representation, this mapping is impossible in Harmonic Serialism, even if it would be allowed in classic Optimality Theory. In cluster simplification, deletion or Place assimilation is the second step in a derivation that begins with deleting Place features, and deleting Place features improves harmony only in coda position.

scholarly journals Majority Rule in Harmonic Serialism

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Lamont
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Majority Rule ◽  
Harmonic Serialism ◽  
Output Constraints ◽  
Directional Constraint ◽  
Local Representations

Majority Rule is an unattested process where agreement is controlled by the largest class in the input. As a function from inputs to outputs, Majority Rule requires more computational expressivity than do attested phonological transformations. This paper examines how Majority Rule arises in parallel Optimality Theory and Harmonic Serialism. It is shown that in HS, Majority Rule relies on globally evaluated output constraints, which are known to produce computationally complex pathologies. However, without them, HS is unable to produce iterative harmony at all. We propose adopting directional constraint evaluation in HS as a way of modeling harmony while maintaining local representations.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document