I’ve recently had some useful discussion with people about the nature of representations in OT, and how they did or did not (or should or should not) change from a theory with inviolable constraints (= principles and parameters theory). I’d like to summarize my thoughts, and would very much welcome further discussion.
In our discussion following Tobias Scheer’s mfm fringe presentation, I brought up the point that when one switches to violable constraints, it’s not obvious that the representations should stay the same. Tobias asked for an example, and I didn’t have a good one right away, but then realized that a particularly clear and worked out one is in the discussion of extrametricality vs. nonfinality in Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004. Gaja Jarosz also reminded me of underspecification: since markedness is expressed in output constraints in OT, it’s not obvious that one also requires a theory of input underspecification for that purpose.
I think my own experience of working on my *NC project in the mid nineties illustrates some more aspects of what happened to representations as OT was being extended to segmental phonology, and brings up some further issues. When I started that project, I was looking for an explanation for the facts in terms of feature markedness and positional licensing. I wanted to get the directionality of postnasal voicing, which unlike most other local assimilation processes is L-to-R, instead R-to-L. I also wanted to get conspiracies amongst processes that resolve nasal-voiceless obstruent clusters. I tried hard and failed, and eventually “gave up” and used the formally stipulative but phonetically grounded *NC constraint. I later realized that this failure was part of a more general issue: it doesn’t seem to be the case that positional markedness can always be derived from the combination of general context-free markedness constraints and general positional licensing constraints. The best I could do in terms of those assumptions was to say that the coda nasal [voice] wanted to be licensed in onset position and hence spread, but that didn’t explain why it was just nasals that did this, nor did it deal sufficiently well with directionality. I have some more discussion of the general problems with deriving positional markedness from prosodic licensing, and further references, in a discussion of local conjunction on p. 10 of this paper (also in my review of the Harmonic Mind).
Taking the approach to segmental phonology in the *NC proposal, we can ask what that commits us to in terms of a theory of representations. It looks to me like what we would need is a feature set that is sufficiently expressive to formalize our constraints, but that’s it. Phonetic grounding is expressed as restrictions on the universal set of constraints (or as restrictions on possible rankings, in work like Steriade’s on perceptual grounding). And this set of features could be universal, with no language-specific choices (thanks to Pavel Iosad for a question on this) – contrast and its absence can be captured by ranking alone. Furthermore, I don’t think there is any sense in which this theory has the concept of a natural class (thanks to Kristine Yu for a question on that). So this perhaps at least partially explains why the nature of segmental representations has not been a big topic in at least some variants of OT.
Now I should say that I can see lots of reasons why you would want to say that features do differ from language to language, and why the particular feature set you choose could have consequences for predictions about learning and generalization. But in terms of the particular theory I’ve just described, I don’t see any arguments for language-specific differences in feature specification. I should probably also say that I see reasons why one might not want to model the role of phonetics in phonology as just stipulations about the constraint set with some armchair phonetic justification – there are clearly plenty of alternatives. But the proposal is a natural extension to general approach to encoding of substance in OT as stipulations about constraints: e.g. that there is Onset and NoCoda, but not NoOnset and Coda.
Finally, let me emphasize that what I’ve said about a lack of interest in the nature of segmental representations based on my *NC work should not be taken as representative of a lack of interest in segmental features in OT as a whole (or even in my mind!). For example, there are extremely interesting questions about the nature of the representations needed for `spreading’: Bakovic (2000: diss.) takes the position that there is no spreading, while others have defended autosegmental representations or adopted gestural representations, and yet others (e.g. Cole and Kisseberth) have proposed domain-based representations.