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Idempotency in Optimality Theory1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 March 2017
Abstract
An idempotent phonological grammar maps phonotactically licit forms faithfully to themselves. This paper establishes tight sufficient conditions for idempotency in (classical) Optimality Theory. Building on Tesar (2013), these conditions are derived in two steps. First, idempotency is shown to follow from a general formal condition on the faithfulness constraints. Second, this condition is shown to hold for a variety of faithfulness constraints which naturally arise within McCarthy & Prince’s (1995) Correspondence Theory of faithfulness. This formal analysis provides an exhaustive toolkit for modeling chain shifts, which have proven recalcitrant to a constraint-based treatment.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017
Footnotes
Parts of this paper have been presented at WCCFL 33 at Simon Fraser University in March 2015 (see also Magri 2016), at the Workshop on Computational Phonology and Morphology at Chicago University in July 2015, and at OCP 12 in Budapest in January 2016. The research reported in this paper has been supported by a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship (Grant agreement number: PIEF-GA-2011-301938).
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