Serial Markedness Reduction

Jarosz, Gaja. 2014. Serial Markedness Reduction. Proceedings of 2013 Annual Meetings on Phonology 1(1), Amherst, MA.

Abstract

This paper contributes to the growing body of work on HS and the ongoing debate about constraint- based approaches to opacity by proposing a mechanism that enables the modeling of both counterfeeding and counterbleeding interactions in HS proper. The new proposal, Serial Markedness Reduction (SMR), introduces a new family of constraints inspired by, but crucially different from, OT-CC’s PREC constraints. The SMR constraints evaluate aspects of phonological derivations much like PREC constraints; however, unlike PREC constraints, SMR constraints work on the fly as derivations are gradually constructed. SMR is a minimal elaboration of HS, and it significantly streamlines the machinery necessary to model counterfeeding and counterbleeding opacity as compared to OT-CC. It also opens the door to a novel, local formulation of process interaction that avoids the need to construct and inspect complete derivations, as in OT-CC.

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