In defense of serialism

These remarks review evidence that the major empirical advances of optimality theory (OT) over earlier work result from its theory of constraints & constraint interaction, rather than from its theory of parallel candidate evaluation. It is argued that while OT's theory of constraints has clarified many areas of phonological & morphological patterning, its implementation in terms of parallel evaluation has led to few, if any, empirical insights in these domains, while raising a number of important & largely unsolved problems. It suggests that it may be time to ask whether classical OT can be reconfigured in such a way as to consolidate its empirical advances while reexamining the nature of the input-output mapping, incorporating some of the desirable features of serialist approaches to phonology. 38 References. Adapted from the source document