NC: Licensing and Underspecification in Optimality Theory
 

Junko Ito, Armin Mester, Jaye Padgett

University of California, Santa Cruz





In recent years the program of feature underspecification has come
 under intense critical scrutiny, with various empirical difficulties
 and apparent paradoxes leading some to abandon the use of
 underspecification altogether.  This paper instead seeks to resolve
 one sort of underspecification paradox, exemplified by facts of
 voicing in Japanese, by harnessing the notions of constraint ranking
 and violability provided by Optimality Theory. 



Though output underspecification is maintained, it does not
 pattern in the all-or- nothing way predicted by known theories;
 further, it reveals itself as an emergent property of the grammar,
 thus leading to a rejection of the traditional reliance on a feature
 minimization imperative at the underlying representation, a notion
 that is not compatible with OT's output-oriented outlook. 
 

The empirical focus is post-nasal voicing; major issues
 addressed include a theory of feature licensing, the claim that
 segment similarity can constrain feature interaction, and the explicit
 extension of tableau-based candidate selection to Lexicon Optimization
 ('tableau des tableaux' technique).