Unbounded Stress and Factorial Typology

In this paper I demonstrate how a small set of constraints independently motivated for the analysis of bounded stress systems within Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) is sufficient to account for the gross characteristics of strikingly different unbounded stress systems (see also Tesar 1998). This sufficiency is an important factorial typological consequence of the ranking of violable universal constraints, the cornerstone assumption of OT, a fact that serves as the primary motivating force behind this line of investigation. The constraints involved in the analysis and the logic of their interactions with one another turn out to reveal some important properties of constraint (in)activity through ranking in OT, a topic to which I devote particular attention.This paper was originally published in RuLing Papers 1: Working Papers from Rutgers University (1998). A revised version was published in Optimality Theory in Phonology: A Reader (2004) and is available at http://works.bepress.com/ebakovic/14Bakovic, E. (2004). Unbounded stress and factorial typology. In J. J. McCarthy (Ed.) Optimality theory in phonology: A reader (pp. 202-214). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing