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A restrictive, parsimonious theory of footing in directional Harmonic Serialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2022

Andrew Lamont*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University College London, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF. Email: andrew.lamont@ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract

This paper develops a theory of footing in Harmonic Serialism (HS; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004; McCarthy 2000, 2016) where Con contains only directionally evaluated constraints (Eisner 2000, 2002; Lamont 2019, 2022a, 2022b). Directional constraints harmonically order candidates by the location of violations rather than the total number of violations. A central result of adopting directional evaluation is that the constraint Parse($\sigma$) not only motivates iterative footing but also determines where feet surface. This obviates the need for alignment constraints (McCarthy & Prince 1993; McCarthy 2003; Hyde 2012a, 2016), which determine where feet are parsed in HS with constraints that count loci (Pruitt 2010, 2012). The theory uses fewer constraints, is empirically adequate, and makes more restrictive predictions than HS with counting constraints and parallel Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) with directional constraints.

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Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Possible derivations from /$\sigma \sigma \sigma \sigma$/; candidates in grey are not possible optima, and are not passed back into Gen

Figure 1

Figure 2. Combining the derivations generated from four- and two-syllable strings; combinations with thick black lines have satisfiable ranking conditions, and those with thin grey lines require inconsistent rankings

Figure 2

Figure 3. Full (a) and simplified (b) Hasse diagrams of the constraint ranking for antepenultimate stress

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