A restrictive, parsimonious theory of footing in directional Harmonic Serialism

Abstract

AbstractThis paper develops a theory of footing in Harmonic Serialism (HS; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004; McCarthy 2000, 2016) where Con contains only directionally evaluated constraints (Eisner 2000, 2002; Lamont 2019, 2022a, 2022b). Directional constraints harmonically order candidates by the location of violations rather than the total number of violations. A central result of adopting directional evaluation is that the constraint Parse($\sigma$) not only motivates iterative footing but also determines where feet surface. This obviates the need for alignment constraints (McCarthy & Prince 1993; McCarthy 2003; Hyde 2012a, 2016), which determine where feet are parsed in HS with constraints that count loci (Pruitt 2010, 2012). The theory uses fewer constraints, is empirically adequate, and makes more restrictive predictions than HS with counting constraints and parallel Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) with directional constraints.