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The purpose of this paper is to show that verb to noun conversion in Papiamentu can be accounted for straightforwardly within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993; McCarthy & Prince, 1995). To this end, I assume after Pater (2000) that a single constraint can be multiply instantiated in a constraint hierarchy, and each constraint may be indexed to apply to a particular set of lexical items. This approach is shown to capture distinctions between generality and exceptionality of tone and stress patterns in Papiamentu conversion in terms of the interaction between markedness and faithfulness constraints. I specifically claim that the lexically indexed faithfulness constraint BASE-IDENTITYP outranks the markedness constraints NOUN STRESS and NOUN TONE, which in turn rank above the general faithfulness constraint BASE-IDENTITY. It is shown that with the constraint ranking, all the tone and stress patterns that occur in deverbal nouns can be given a unified, satisfactory account. The analysis argued for in this paper makes better predictions than a traditional approach