LICENSING AND UNDERSPECIFICATION IN OPTIMALITY THEORY

This article seeks to resolve one sort of underspecification paradox, by harnessing the notions of constraint ranking and violability provid ed by Optimality Theory (OT). Though output underspecification is main tained, it does not pattern in the all-or-nothing way predicted by kno wn theories; further, it is an emergent property of the grammar, leadi ng to rejection of the traditional reliance on feature minimization in underlying representations, a notion that is not compatible with OT's output-oriented perspective. The empirical focus is on nasal-obstruen t (NC) voicing in Japanese; major issues addressed include feature lic ensing, the hypothesis that segment similarity constrains feature inte raction, and the relation between output forms and underlying represen tations.