In ancient Greek, the pitch accent of most words depends on the syllabification assigned to underlying representations, while a smaller, morphologically identifiable class of derived words is accented on the basis of the surface syllable structure, which results from certain contraction and deletion processes. Noyer 1997 proposes a cyclic analysis of these facts and argues that they are incompatible with parallel OT assumptions. His central claim is that the pre-surface syllabification to which accent is assigned in the bulk of the (...) Greek vocabulary does not occur at a “level privileged by UG,” such as the word level or the “cycle-final” level, but simply at an arbitrary point in the derivation.. The implication is that extrinsic rule ordering is required to do justice to the accent system. Thus, Noyer’s work presents a challenge to any version of OT phonology. In this paper, I take up the challenge and argue that, although fully parallel OT may not be up to dealing with these accentual facts, the stratal version of OT based on Lexical Phonology and Phonology provides a much better analysis of them than phonology with ordered rules does. (shrink)

We propose an OT-theoretic typology of vowel harmony systems based on a comparative study of front/back harmony. Harmony processes are governed by a general constraint that imposes feature agreement on neighboring segments. Disharmonic (“neutral”) segments arise when this constraint is dominated by markedness constraints and/or by faithfulness constraints that govern segment inventories. These constraint interactions determine whether disharmonic segments are opaque or transparent, and fix the cross-linguistically diverse behavior of the latter. We make crucial use of two modes of local (...) constraint conjunction, which are already implicit in the current theory. Our proposal restricts this theory by eliminating the possibility of freely stipulating the domain of local conjunction. (shrink)

Compared to more familiar varieties of Swedish, the dialects spoken in Finland have rather diverse syllable structures. The distribution of distinctive syllable weight is determined by grammatical factors, and by varying effects of final consonant weightlessness. In turn it constrains several gemination processes which create derived superheavy syllables, in an unexpected way which provides evidence for an anti-neutralization constraint. Stratal OT, which integrates OT with Lexical Phonology, sheds light on these complex quantity systems.