Faithfulness and Componentiality in Metrics
Bruce Hayes · The MIT Press eBooks · 2008
this paper. They are absolved, in the usual way, of responsibility for defects. Second, there is the problem of marked winners: as we will see, many existing lines or other verse structures violate Markedness constraints. Why shouldn't these marked winners lose out to less marked alternatives? Hayes and MacEachern (1998) attempt to explain this by supposing that whenever a winning candidate violates a Markedness constraint, there are still higherranking Markedness constraints that are violated by all of the rival candidates. However, as we will see, this cannot be true in general. In phonology, the reason marked winners can occur is plain: they obey Faithfulness constraints that are violated by all of their less-marked rivals. But it is not immediately clear how Faithfulness can be implemented in metrics: in a patently non-derivational system, where are the underlying forms that surface candidates can be faithful to? Third, the problem of marked winners arises again when we consider metrical complexity. Intuitively, in certain cases we want to say that the Markedness violations of a winner give rise to a complexity penalty. However, as we will see, in many other cases, Markedness violations can occur with inducing any penalty at all. What distinguishes the two cases? Last, there is a problem of the missing remedy. OT defines the output of any derivation as the most harmonic candidate, the form created by GEN that wins the candidate competition. Thus, in principle, every unmetrical form ought to have a well-formed counterpart, an alternative that wins the competition that the unmetrical form loses. But this fails to correspond to the experience of poets and listeners; unmetrical forms like (1)c usually sound wrong without suggesting any specific alternative