DM and John J. McCarthy

[Sasson Margaliot]

DM and OT are not Usually going together. Interestingly, in th erecent
article called "Pausal Phonology and Morpheme Realization", John McCarthy is
taking OUTPUT of Distributed Morphology to be INPUT to OT phonology.

Quotation from McCarthy's article :

      " Realizational theories of morphology, 
      such as Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), 
      assume that the phonological forms of morphemes are 
      the result of processes that spell-out morphosyntactic features. "


In the article, McCarthuy is trying to explore how a version of OT  known as
"Harmonic Serialism" can work with DM, suggesting (folowing Wolf's 2008
dissertation) that DM's Vocabulary Insertion is actually being performed by
Phonology module. They call it "Optimal Interleaving".

Each time a Vocabulary Item needs to be inserted instead of a morpheme, the
Items compete in and the "optimal" Item is the one resembling the  morpheme'
features the most.  Then phonology "harmonizes" the intermediate result
before adding the next Vocabulary Item, etc.



Sasson Margaliot