Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

P. COUTSOUGERA
different areas of the same language.
7.2 Parallelism
A fundamental principle of OT is parallelism: evaluation of candidates is
performed simultaneously. OT (and consequently ST) is therefore to be
preferred to Serialism because all processes as well as the rankings
determining them are parallelled and thus abstract intermediate levels of
representations, which are claimed to be psychologically implausible in
human languages, are avoided. The question is though: “Are phonological
processes really parallelled in ST?”.
Let us try to work out the algorithm of ST: GEN generates
candidates among which there is the optimal one and the sympathetic
one. However, it appears that EVAL acts in two steps / stages: after the
selector constraint has selected the ❀candidate, the ❀constraint mediates
in the evaluation. EVAL checks which candidates are faithful or not to
the ❀candidate with respect to the content of the ❀constraint and discards
the candidates which are unfaithful to it. It then checks which of the
surviving candidates are faithful or not to the input with respect to the
content of the other faithfulness constraints while also checks violations /
fulfilments of markedness constraints. Apparently, this cannot be a
parallel process.
In order to symbolically describe the process of selecting the
optimal candidate, let us define Cand to be the set of all the candidates
and C the set of the constraints, both of which are potentially infinite, i.e.
i
{ cd :i = 1,2 ∞}
Cand = ,...,
We define an indicator function
violates some constraint j ( C ) as Ι
j
and = { C : j = 1,2,...,
∞}
i, j
C j .
Ι to denote whether or not i ( cd )
⎧
= ⎨
⎩
0 , if
i violates j
i, j
.
1, if
i obeys
The first step is to eliminate all the candidates that violate the
❀constraint, resulting in a reduced set F 1. F 1, a subset of Cand, is the set
that contains all successful candidates and symbolically we write
F = −
⎧ i i ⎫
1 Cand ⎨cd
:*! cd ⎬
⎩ j
, where *! stands for violation.
sym ⎭
The second step is to choose the optimal candidate among the
candidates in F 1 . From now on we proceed as in a normal OT tableau and
j
i
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