Aaron Kaplan

Harmonic Improvement without Candidate Chains in Chamorro

This article argues that some ostensible advantages of Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC) over classic OT are actually liabilities. OT-CC correctly predicts that Chamorro umlaut occurs only when trigger and target are adjacent. But OT-CC is incompatible with similar phenomena like Central Venetan metaphony, and attempts to modify OT-CC to produce metaphony impair the theorys handling of umlaut. Classic OT provides a superior approach: constraints grounded in prominence asymmetries produce the umlaut facts, and there is no conflict with analyses of metaphony. This result suggests that despite OT-CCs advancements in treatments of opacity, the theorys machinery remains inadequate in important ways.

Stress is the Trigger of Chamorro Umlaut

An adequate account of umlaut must explain why unstressed vowels are not viable targets for umlaut, and, alternatively, why umlaut cannot spread through these unstressed vowels to reach the stressed vowel (*i pilénnun, *i mindéŋgu). The attested behavior is unexpected from the point of view of Positional Faithfulness (Beckman, 1999) because weak (unstressed) positions block spreading while strong (stressed) positions permit it. These data seem to call for ―reverse‖ Positional Faithfulness constraints that preferentially protect unstressed syllables. Second, umlaut may optionally target a certain kind of secondary stress:

Local optionality with partial orders

In local optionality, an optional process may apply at some loci in a form but not at others. Some theories of optionality, such as Partial Orders Theory, produce optionality by making multiple strict constraint rankings available, and have been claimed to be incompatible with local optionality: if the process-triggering constraint outranks faithfulness, the process applies exhaustively; under the opposite ranking, it applies nowhere. On this view, candidates in which the process applies at some loci but not others are harmonically bounded. This paper argues against that position by showing that for a variety of locally optional processes each locus can be independently manipulated if the theory makes use of constraints that target particular prosodic or morphosyntactic units – constraints that are motivated independently of their utility in local optionality. The result is that, contrary to the harmonic-bounding argument, Partial Orders Theory can provide plausible accounts of local optionality.