Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Constraint-based phonology has focused almost exclusively on the question concerning the nature of the constraints. Almost no attention has been paid so far to the question concerning the mode of constraint interaction. Within categorical phonology, the Optimality Theory (OT; PrinceSmolensky 2004) mode of constraint interaction has been adopted unquestioningly without any debate of possible alternatives. The Harmonic Grammar (HG; Smolensky and Legendre 2006) alternative explored in the most recent literature is only minimally different from OT (Pater 2007). This talk tries to fill this gap. I start by making explicit a simple axiom implicitly adopted by all schools of categorical phonology: that the surface realization of the concatenation of two underlying forms is quite simply the concatenation of their surface realizations in isolation, unless the concatenation itself creates or dissolves some marked structures. In other words, categorical phonology is quite boring most of the time. I then offer a complete characterization of all and only the modes of constraint interaction that comply with my axiom. As a corollary, OT and HG are shown to be the two simplest modes of constraint interaction that comply with the axiom. Somehow, constraint-based phonologists got it right without knowing why.