Variation within Optimality Theory

Optionality and Gradience in Persian Phonology: An Optimality Treatment

The distribution of the allophones of /?/in certain contexts involves free variation and gradient preferences. An organized survey was conducted to elicit the judgments of 37 native Persian speakers concerning the well-formedness of /?/allophonic behavior in five different phonological positions. The results showed that the differences in judgment between the various categories are not just t...

Optimality Of Monetary And Fiscal Policies In Iran: An Application Of The Stochastic Optimal Control Theory

Variation in acquisition: An optimal approach

The presence of intra-speaker variation in early acquisition has long presented an intriguing problem for researchers of phonological development. This paper demonstrates how Optimality Theory is useful in identifying three different types of variation in acquisition, only one of which is a true case of ‘multiple optimal outputs. It then illustrates how multiple optimal outputs can be handled f...

Optimality in Sentence Processing

In this chapter we explore the possibility that within Optimality Theory, a single syntactic grammar directly yields not only competence theoretic results on the grammatical distributions of elements, but also performance theoretic results on relative preferences when processing sentences with various syntactic ambiguities. Whereas the competence theory applies the grammar at the level of an en...

Sonority variation in Stochastic Optimality Theory: Implications for markedness hierarchies

Constraints based on the sonority scale and other markedness hierarchies have been formalized in two different ways: as scale-partition constraint families, with a universally fixed ranking, and as stringency constraint families, where the constraints stand in subset relations and their ranking is not universal. We identify a new empirical domain where these two approaches make different predic...