Publisher's Synopsis
Disjunctivity is a type of process-blocking that has received special attention since the inception of generative phonology (Chomsky & Halle 1968) and has significantly impacted research in other subfields in linguistics. The principle commonly held to be responsible for disjunctivity, the Elsewhere Condition (Kiparsky 1973), is argued to be little more than a collection of stipulations within the original Chomsky & Halle framework. By contrast, disjunctivity follows automatically from the fundamental assumptions of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004), with no added stipulations necessary. This is demonstrated by the author via a complete proof of Panini's Theorem on Constraint-ranking.
