Noniterativity is an Emergent Property of Grammar

This dissertation focuses on the role of noniterativity in phonology. Iterativity/noniterativity is often taken to be basic dimension along which phonological processes may differ, but because of their very different formal orientations, rule-based phonology and Optimality Theory treat this dimension in very different ways. While writing a noniterative rule is simple, OT's prohibition against markedness constraints that reference the input prevents noniterativity from being formalized in that framework. The argument is that genuine noniterativity (a phenomenon that requires an analysis with a noniterative rule) is nonexistent in the world's languages. Potential counterexamples are better understood as the confluence of factors (such as spreading to an immediately local position of prominence) that are not explicitly concerned with noniterativity.