Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

Implications Of Harmonic Serialism For Lexical Tone Association, John J. Mccarthy, Kevin Mullin, Brian W. Smith

John J. McCarthy

In some languages, notably Kikuyu, the association of tones and syllables is completely predictable. In this chapter, we show that a derivational version of Optimality Theory, Harmonic Serialism, cannot account for Kikuyu if underlying representations include preassociated tones. If richness of the base is to be maintained, then underlying representations can contain associated tones in no language, even a language with contrastive tone association. This leads to a discussion of alternative ways of lexically encoding these contrasts, such as sequences of identical tones and diacritic accents.

Reduplication In Harmonic Serialism, John J. Mccarthy, Wendell Kimper, Kevin Mullin

John J. McCarthy

In standard Optimality Theory, faithfulness constraints are defined in terms of an input-output correspondence relation, and similar constraints are applied to the correspondence relation between a stem and its reduplicative copy. In Harmonic Serialism, a derivational version of Optimality Theory, there is no input-output correspondence relation, and instead faithfulness violations are based on which operations the candidate-generating GEN component has applied.

This article presents a novel theory of reduplication, situated within Harmonic Serialism, called Serial Template Satisfaction. Reduplicative correspondence constraints are replaced by operations that copy strings of constituents. Depending on the constraint ranking, phonological processes may precede or follow …