Faithfulness and underspecification

This work is about two ‘generation problems’ for classic Optimality Theory, chain shifts and saltations. The issues OT posed by traditional analyses of saltations have led to various embellishments the theory, typically in form novel constraint types. Reiss (2021a,b) proposes a general solution problem that relies more directly on different assumptions representations than constraints. Specifically, assumes underlying may be underspecified, map ‘counts’ as shift or saltation so long surface alternants from uniform representation match respective observed alternants. We report here three results our ongoing formal assessment Reiss’s proposed solution.