Lee, Minkyung. 2016. Catalan pronominal cliticization revisited: Anti-serial but pro-parallel OT? Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 22.2. 335-359.
Optimality Theory (OT) underlies different implication from different theorem; parallelism vs. serialism. OT based upon Harmonic Serialism (HS) is fairly straightforward in dealing with the pronominal cliticization phenomena found in the Barcelona variety of Catalan. A schwa vowel, no matter where it is epenthesized, results from locality via the Gen-Eval loop. In Catalan, vowel epenthesis is sensitive to the domain of the clitic-verb or clitic-clitic adjacency, with peripheral epenthesis in the former but central epenthesis in the latter due to the CrispEdge effect. Interestingly enough, syllabically unmotivated vowel epenthesis is overapplied with or without opacity. Especially, for the case of a vocalic clitic affixed, vowel epenthesis is opaque. Unlike in strata-based serial OT with ranking permutation, local optimality via the Gen-Eval loop effectively captures various aspects of vowel epenthesis during the whole course of cliticization in Catalan. Accordingly, the previous proposal of anti-serialism but pro-parallelism for the phonology of clitics in Catalan needs to be reconsidered. Rather, a different theorem reveals a possible variant implementation. (Daegu University)