This study illustrates the role of Lexical Selection (Mascaró 2007) in Optimality Theory in accounting for the Welsh definite article's allomorphy. This is in response to the claims made by Hannahs & Tallerman (2006) that OT is unable to account for the behavior and distribution of the definite article. This study addresses three of the points that Hannahs & Tallerman raised which I am calling the grammar problem, the homophony problem, and the allomorph interaction. I show that Lexical Selection is uniquely adapted to account for each of the points concerning the definite article allomorphy. Additionally, this study proposes that Lexical Selection needs to be amended with multiple Priority constraints that are morpheme specific. It also appears that there appears to exist a unique relationship between the constraint rankings of these multiple Priority constraints in what is called the prioritization of the hierarchy.

One significant contribution of generative linguistics has been to our understanding of 'movement,' which occurs when a word is linearized in a position different from where it is interpreted. Even though movement often is considered a syntactic phenomenon, some cases seem best analyzed prosodically, such as pronoun post-posing in Irish (Bennett, Elfner, & McClosky 2016). We explore prosodically driven movement in Norwegian, which is known for having pronominal object shift (OS). We show that OS can be explained by Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011), but only if the MATCH constraints are sensitive to lexical items and their projects instead of Elfner's (2012) definition where Match is sensitive to lexical and functional elements and their projections (see also Ito & Mester 2019).

Editors' Note for the Proceedings of the 2020 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2020), held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in September 2020.