| Abstract: | Paradigmatic pressures do not work in a homogeneous or symmetric way. As already noted by many scholars, factors such as the degree of phonological similarity, the degree of semantic closeness, the degree of productivity between the members of a paradigm, or the number of grammatical properties which these members share are directly correlated with the degree of phonological pressure exerted between them. Optimality Theory has built up many proposals to account for surface similarities between the members of a paradigm but none explicitly deals with the problem of inclusion, that is, with those cases in which given the paradigm set , only a partial subset of the paradigm, say or , is under paradigmatic pressure. This paper is an attempt to deal with the notion of inclusion within paradigms. We show how the Optimal Paradigms model (McCarthy [2001] 2005) and the Transderivational Correspondence Theory (Benua [1997] 2000) can be extended to apply not only within flat paradigms but also within paradigms with an internal uneven structure, in such a way that nominal morphological categories like Gender and Number, verbal morphological categories like Tense, Number, Person, etc., or the productivity of a given derivative process are explicit in the formal machinery of the theory. Due to space reasons, we illustrate our proposal by focusing on two Romance phenomena —overapplication of cluster reduction in Catalan and overapplication of diphthongization in Spanish— but it can be extended to many other phenomena which will be referred to briefly when necessary. Our account, on the other hand, consubstantially touches on (non-formally-biased) aspects such as the relation between the inflectional categories Gender and Number and their universal ranking and implications, or the relation between productive and non-productive derivation. |
