Opacity update

A while back, I did a kind of accidental post on opacity. Time for a quick update: I've learned from emails flying among local linguists that 'mainstream' Optimality Theorists are now adopting a bold new solution to this problem: Harmonic Serialism. It's laid out in this paper:

McCarthy, John J. Forthcoming. “The serial interaction of stress and syncope.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Available here.

It's an explicit return to serial derivation, but of course keeping 'harmonic' aspects familiar from OT. There are numerous people out there still fighting the war for monostratal phonology and it'll be interesting to see how they react to this.