Positional Faithfulness, Non-locality, and the Harmonic Serialism Solution

Abstract

Pathologies arise in parallel OT when a positional faithfulness constraint and a conflicting markedness constraint dominate the constraints responsible for determining which segments, if any, occupy the privileged position. Under such rankings, an underlying featural contrast can be displaced onto the output prosodic structure. (The possibility of such effects was first noted in Beckman 1998:37fn.) Here I show that the problem is general one in parallel OT, and that the resulting pathological patterns are opaque and can be highly non-local. The solution in Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy 2006, 2007, 2008) comes not from altering the ranking, but from reinterpreting the basis upon which privilege is established. Rather than being based on the prosodification in the output candidate, privilege is argued here to stem from the prosodic structure associated with the input to the current step in the derivation. This approach allows the desired effects of positional faithfulness to be seen, without also predicting opaque and non-local patterns that fall outside the range of what is attested in human language.

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