Perceptually Grounded Faithfulness in Harmonic Serialism

Steriade (2008) argues that faithfulness constraints in Optimality Theory are perceptually grounded: the faithfulness of a phonological mapping is directly proportional to the perceptual similarity between the input and the output of that mapping. For example, when a phonological process like place assimilation, voice assimilation, or deletion affects a medial consonant cluster /VC1C2V/, it usually targets C1 rather than C2. The explanation is that changing C1 is less of a change perceptually than changing C2, because C2’s prevocalic position gives it stronger perceptual cues than C1. Formally, this difference in strength of perceptual cues is reflected in the ranking of faithfulness constraints: processes affecting C1 violate lower-ranking faithfulness constraints than processes affecting C2. A mapping has an input and an output, and faithfulness constraints require an input and an output to compare. In the standard parallel version of Optimality Theory, referred to here as P-OT, the input to every mapping is the underlying representation and the output is the surface representation (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). When this property of P-OT is combined with perceptually grounded faithfulness, a problem arises (Blumenfeld 2006, Flemming 2006, 2008a,b, Gallagher 2006, Jun 2002, McCarthy 2008b, Wilson 2001): underlying representations lack information that is important for perception. For example, the release of a stop consonant contains important perceptual cues for its place of articulation. In most if not all languages, the distribution of release is determined by the grammar, not the lexicon: stops are released prevocalically, but they may be unreleased (depending on the language) preconsonantally. If important perceptual cues like release are not already determined in underlying representation, how can faithfulness be perceptually grounded?