Harmonic Serialism and Finite-State Optimality Theory

This paper presents a new finite-state model of Optimality Theory (OT). In this model, two assumptions are imposed on the OT framework. Firstly, I adopt the Harmonic Serialism version of OT, in which output forms are derived from input forms via a series of incremental changes. Secondly, constraints are assumed to be strictly local in the sense that each markedness constraint specifies a set of banned sequences, each occurrence of which is penalized. I show that these two assumptions suffice to reduce the power of OT to rational relations.