Extensions of faithfulness: Rotuman revisited

Abstract

Faithfulness in Prosodic Morphology and Phonology: Rotuman RevisitedIn addition to these theoretical and empirical objectives, this article also offers discussion of several other issues of potential interest.Throughout the article, but particularly in section 3.4, evidence is presented in support of Optimality Theory over operational approaches to phonological description.The same section also addresses the question of substantive versus formal restrictions on linguistic expressions, when the matter of "C/V tier segregation" in Rotuman is addressed.The theory of templates in prosodic morphology is touched on in connection with the proper characterization of the incomplete phase (section 3.2).Also within prosodic morphology, the derivational theory of positive prosodic circumscription is called into question, and an Optimality-Theoretic alternative is presented (section 4.2). Correspondence in Optimality TheoryThe results in this article are set within Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), and they rest upon correspondence (McCarthy & Prince 1993a, 1994b, 1995), which extends and develops the original OT conception of faithfulness.Correspondence is a general way of relating representations to one another.The representations related by correspondence may be lexical and surface, base and reduplicant, or other pairs, such as a base and a derived form in root-and-pattern or truncatory morphology.Rankable constraints apply to correspondent elements, demanding completeness of correspondence, preservation of linear order under correspondence, and the like.Correspondent segments are often identical to one another, but identity of correspondents is also enforced by rankable, and therefore violable, constraints.Correspondence was proposed as a theory of reduplicative copying in McCarthy & Prince (1993a); it is generalized to the lexical-surface relation in McCarthy & Prince (1994b, 1995); further extension of correspondence to intra-paradigmatic relations is pursued in Benua (1995, forthcoming) and below, in section 5.Correspondence is defined as follows:(2) Correspondence Given two strings S 1 and S 2 , correspondence is a relation U from the elements of S 1 to those of S 2 .Elements α0S 1 and β0S 2 are referred to as correspondents of one another when αUβ.The output-generating component Gen supplies candidate forms S 2 together with S 1 and the relation U between them.The particular U for any (S 1 , S 2 ) pair expresses the dependency, if any, of S 2 on S 1 .The harmonyevaluating component Eval then considers each candidate pair with its associated correspondence relation, assessing the completeness of correspondence in S 1 or S 2 , the featural identity of correspondent elements in S 1 and S 2 , and so on.The following constraints on correspondent elements will be particularly important in the discussion below (McCarthy & Prince 1994b, 1995):(3) MAX Every element of S 1 has a correspondent in S 2 .

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