Opaque Allomorphy in OT: Candidate Chains vs. Derivational Optimality Theory

Abstract

This article investigates the opacity in allomorphic processes in the masculine nominative plural of Polish nouns. It is shown that the discussed cases of allomorphy are opaque. Subsequently, it is examined whether Optimality Theory can account for the opacity in the Polish data and concluded that parallel evaluation is unable to handle the relevant examples. Next, the problem is reanalyzed within the theory of candidate chains in order to determine whether the theory is capable of providing a non-derivational account. However, this version of Optimality Theory fails to achieve the attested output. It is concluded that candidate chains are unable to handle the opaque generalizations. Finally, the non-derivational account is juxtaposed with Derivational Optimality Theory in order to prove that Optimality Theory must admit derivational levels.KEYWORDS: Optimality Theory; Polish phonology; opacity; candidate chains; allomorphy. IntroductionOptimality Theory Smolensky 1993, 2004;and McCarthy and Prince 1995) offers new insight into allomorphy processes. Given the universality principle, allomorphs, whose distribution is language-specific, are evaluated by universal constraints. The idea of universality dispenses with allomorphy rules for the sake of the aforementioned constraints. Nevertheless, the input-output relation of Optimality Theory (henceforth, OT) proves to be an inadequate mechanism for opaque alternations. OT cannot handle the cases which require an insight into the intermediate stages of evaluation. Thus, in order to maintain a parallelism in OT, various subtheories were proposed. Candidate chains (McCarthy 2007) circumvents the necessity for a derivational step by employing an intermediate stage in a fully parallel evaluation. However, it is shown that the subtheory, which strongly relies on faithfulness violations, is unable to tackle the problematic allomorphs as they do not incur the necessary violations of faithfulness.