Harmony Is Myopic: Reply to Walker 2010

1 Introduction

Wilson (2004, 2006) claims that harmony is myopic: in unbounded spreading processes, the viability of local spreading does not depend on the viability of complete harmony. Walker (2010), however, claims that Central Veneto metaphony represents nonmyopic harmony: height harmony affects an unstressed penult only if the stressed antepenult is a suitable target for spreading.

On the basis of Central Veneto, Walker (2010) argues in favor of parallel evaluation in Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 2004) and against versions of OT with serial evaluation. The argument against serial evaluation relies on a single locality constraint that is insensitive to the quality of skipped vowels. In this squib, I show that using quality-sensitive locality permits an analysis of Central Veneto in Harmonic Serialism (HS) (McCarthy 2000, 2007), which has a number of typological advantages over parallel OT with respect to harmony processes (McCarthy 2011).

To maintain comparability, I adopt the representational and theoretical assumptions in Walker's analysis of Central Veneto, but with a slight modification to the constraints governing locality, which I justify on independent grounds (see section 5 for a brief discussion of the consequences of some of the inherited assumptions). In this squib, I demonstrate that under this modified analysis, Central Veneto no longer poses difficulties for serial evaluation.

2 Central Veneto and Nonmyopia

In Central Veneto, mid vowels [e,o] in stressed syllables raise to high [i,u] when followed by a high vowel. When low and [-ATR] vowels [a,ε,ɔ] appear in stressed position, they do not raise (Walker 2005, 2010).

In words with antepenultimate stress, the stressed vowel targeted by raising is separated from the high trigger by an intervening unstressed penult. When the intervening penult contains a mid vowel, the stressed vowel raises, and the intervening vowel is affected as well (1a). When the intervening penult contains a low vowel, raising of the stressed vowel is blocked (1b). When the stressed vowel is low or [-ATR], the intervening vowel is also unaffected (1c-d).

1. 1.

   Antepenultimate stress ¹
   

   a.	órden-o	úrdin-i	'order (1sg/2sg)'
   b.	lavór-a-v-a	lavór-a-v-i	'work (1sg/2sg impf. ind.)'
   c.	pέrseg-o	pέrseg-i	'peach (m sg/pl)'
   d.	ángol-o	ángol-i	'angle (m sg/pl)'

Walker (2005) proposes that height harmony in Central Veneto is motivated by a licensing constraint: the feature [high] must be licensed by association with a vowel in a stressed syllable. The pattern in (1) represents an apparent case of nonmyopia: spreading [high] to the unstressed penult depends on the possibility of spreading further to the stressed vowel. This presents a problem for serial versions of OT like Harmonic Serialism, which lack derivational lookahead; in an iterative theory of spreading, only one vowel can harmonize at a time, so dependencies like the one in Central Veneto are predicted to be impossible.

In Harmonic Serialism, GEN is restricted to producing candidates that differ from the input by at most a single change. This limited candidate set is evaluated by EVAL, and the optimum becomes the input to the next step in the derivation. The GEN → EVAL loop continues until the faithful candidate at a given step is chosen as the optimum, at which point the derivation converges.²

There are two possible paths leading from /órden-i/ to [úrdin-i] in which only one vowel is changed at a time. In (2a), [high] first spreads to the unstressed penult and subsequently spreads to the stressed vowel. In (2b), [high] first spreads to the stressed vowel and subsequently spreads to the unstressed penult.

1. 2.

   1. a. órden-i → órdin-i → úrdin-i

   2. b. órden-i → úrden-i → úrdin-i

If (2a) were an optimal first step, then */pέrseg-i/ → [pέrsig-i] would also be predicted. Walker (2010) rightly rules out this derivational path. The problem attributed to (2b), which involves nonlocal harmony (transparency), is that not all unstressed penults behave as transparent in Central Veneto: [a] is opaque and does not permit spreading to proceed across it. Walker proposes that the nonlocality in...