Harmonic Serialism and Parallelism



John McCarthy

University of Massachusetts, Amherst





The most familiar architecture for Optimality Theory is a fully parallel 
 one, meaning that "all possible ultimate outputs are contemplated at 
 once" (Prince and Smolensky 1993: 79). But Prince and Smolensky also 
 briefly entertain a serial architecture for OT, called Harmonic Serialism.
 The idea is that Gen Eval iterates, sending the output of Eval back into 
 Gen as a new input. This loop continues until the derivation converges 
 (i.e., until Eval returns the same form as the input to Gen). There are 
 clear resemblances between this approach and theories based on notions 
 like derivational economy (e.g., Chomsky 1995). There is also a connection 
 with serial rule-based phonology. In the implementation of Harmonic 
 Serialism that Prince and Smolensky consider, each iteration of Gen is 
 limited to making a single change in the input. The resulting derivation 
 is quite similar to what rule-based phonology produces, if each rule is 
 limited to the form A B/C__D, where A is a single segment.
 

Apart from chapter 2 of Prince and Smolensky (1993), Harmonic Serialism 
 has not figured very prominently in the literature, though with 
 significant additional enhancements it has been used as a vehicle for 
 incorporating rules into OT by Black (1993) and Blevins (1997).
 

In this talk, I will look closely at Harmonic Serialism (without the 
 enhancements). I will distinguish it from parallel OT and from other 
 serial constraint-based theories such as Harmonic Phonology or "Stratal" 
 OT. My goal is to develop a range of predictions made by Harmonic 
 Serialism, under varying implementational assumptions, for phenomena 
 that have been regarded as typical effects of serial derivation, such as 
 phonological opacity. A key finding is that Harmonic Serialism doesn't 
 improve much on classic parallel OT in analyzing opacity, and in certain 
 other respects does significantly worse. 



References

     

Black, H. Andrew (1993). Constraint-Ranked Derivation: A Serial Approach 
 	to Optimization. PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa 
 	Cruz. 

Blevins, Juliette (1997). Rules in Optimality Theory. In I. Roca (ed.) 
 	Derivations and Constraints in Phonology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 
 	227-260. 

Chomsky, Noam (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
 Prince, Alan, and Paul Smolensky (1993). Optimality Theory: Constraint 
 	interaction in generative grammar, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 
 	NJ. Report RUCCS TR-2.  [To appear, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.]