Abstract
The Atayal language has had minimal analysis done at the prosodic level and that which has been done has merely been descriptive. Theoretically, former analyses of prosody have been carried out in a serial manner, dealing first with syllabification, then going on to analyze footing and stress assignment. This serial approach prevented the analyst from observing the causal relationship between footing and such prosodic reflexes as epenthesis, metathesis, and vowel-glide alternations, as seen in the Mabalay data. Those analysts who made the connection had no formal theory in which to express it. Optimality Theory, as set forth by Prince and Smolensky (1993) and McCarthy and Prince (1993a), approaches the problem from a parallelist perspective, allowing us to see the effects of integrated prosodic constraints directly on the surface forms. This research ties epenthesis, metathesis, and vowel-glide alternations together as prosodic reflexes predominantly of footing constraints. This Atayal dialect uses these as strategies to achieve its goal of forming a perfect iamb. Dialect comparison reveals a reranking of the constraints attains different target structures. This fits with OT's basic assumption that constraints are universal and languages differ due to differences in ranking.