In defense of serialism
Résumé
These remarks review evidence that the major empirical advances of Optimality Theory over earlier work result from its theory of constraints and constraint interaction, rather than from its theory of parallel candidate evaluation. It is argued that while Optimality Theory's theory of constraints has clarified many areas of phono¬logical and morphological pattern¬ing, its implementation in terms of parallel evaluation has led to few, if any, empirical insights in these domains, while raising a number of important and largely unsolved problems. It suggests that it may be time to ask whether classical OT can be reconfigured in such a way as to consolidate its empirical advances while reexamining the nature of the input-output mapping, incorporating some of the desirable features of serialist approaches to phonology.