The Complexity of Optimizing Over Strictly Local Constraints

We show that in Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993), optimization over strictly local (SL; McNaughton and Papert 1971) constraints can generate fully regular patterns. We show that a set of stress constraints defined as SL but evaluated in parallel OT predicts an unattested ``sour grapes''-type stress assignment pattern, in which iterative foot assignment occurs if and only if it generates a full parse. We show that this pattern is fully regular, thus demonstrating that SL constraints are not closed under optimization. Furthermore, while sour grapes has received attention in harmony (Padgett 1995, Wilson 2003, Wilson 2006, McCarthy 2010) and tone phenomena (Jardine 2016), the possibility of sour grapes-like stress has not previously been discussed.