Perceptually grounded faithfulness in Harmonic Serialism. Linguistic Inquiry 42. Available at http://works.bepress.com/john_j_mccarthy/104

are perceptually grounded: the faithfulness of a phonological mapping is directly proportional to the perceptual similarity between the input and 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 C2.1 The idea is that changing C1 is less obtrusive 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 grounde