Speaker: Eyal Marco (Joint work with Radan Nasrallah and Ezer Rasin), Tel Aviv University.
Title: Phonological derivations are not harmonically improving: Evidence from Nazarene Arabic
Time: Monday, December 2, 5-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Opacity poses a well-known challenge for the classical version of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004), which applies phonological processes in a fully parallel fashion. In response to the opacity challenge, a variety of extensions to the classical model have been proposed. Our focus is on extensions that incorporate a limited kind of serialism into OT: Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy 2000, 2016) and Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC; McCarthy 2007). The degree of serialism permitted by these theories is restricted by a property that McCarthy has called ‘Harmonic Improvement’, according to which every derivational step induces a change that creates an output that is more harmonic than the input of that step, i.e., every derivational step must generate a better form with respect to the constraint ranking of the language. One consequence of Harmonic Improvement is that it rules out derivations of the form /A/ ? |B| ? [A] (also known as Duke-of-York, see Pullum 1976, McCarthy 2003, Gleim 2019), because /A/ ? |B| implies that B is more harmonic than A while |B| ? [A] contradictorily implies the opposite.
We present new data regarding the distribution of stress and vowel length in Nazarene Arabic (NZA), an understudied variety of Palestinian Arabic spoken in Nazareth, Israel. We argue that this distribution is opaque and is best analyzed through a derivation of the form /A/ ? |B| ? [A], where the application of a vowel lengthening process is undone by a later vowel shortening process. The distribution thus poses a challenge to serial theories of phonology that obey `Harmonic Improvement’. We show this by arguing that Parallel OT, Harmonic Serialism and OT-CC have trouble generating the NZA pattern, but not rule-based phonology (Chomsky & Halle 1968) and Stratal OT (Bermúdez-Otero 1999, Kiparsky 2000), which have the freedom to undo processes in the course of the derivation.