Optimal Morphology

Optimal morphology (OM) is a finite state formalism tha t unifies concepts from Optimality Theory (OT, Prince ~: Smolensky, 1993) and Declarative Phonology (DP, Scobbie, Coleman Bird, 1996) to describe morphophonological alternations in inflectional morphology. Candidate sets are formalized by inviolable lexical constraints which map abstract morpheme signatures to allomorphs. Phonology is implemented as violable rankable constraints selecting optimal candidates from these. Both types of constraints are realized by finite state transducers. Using phonological da ta from Albanian it is shown tha t given a finite s tate lexicalization of candidate outputs for word forms OM allows more natural analyses than unviolable finite s ta te constraints do. Two possible evaluation strategies for OM grammars are considered: the global evaluation procedure from E1lisou (1994) and a simple s t ra tegy of local constraint evaluation. While the OM-specific lexicalization of candidate sets allows straightforward generation and a simple method of morphological parsing even under global evaluation, local constraint evaluation is shown to be preferable empirically and to be formally more restrictive. The first point is illustrated by an account of directionality effects in some classical Mende data. A procedure is given tha t generates a finite s ta te t ransducer simulating the effects of local constraint evaluation. Thus local as opposed to global evaluation (Frank & Satta, 1998) seems to guarantee the finite-stateness of the input-output-mapping. 1 C/O-Alternations in Albanian Verbs In many cases C/O-al ternat ions in the Albanian verb paradigm are triggered by the tendency to avoid sequences of vowels (VV, hiatus) or consonants (CC), e.g.