Optimality Theory and Minimalism: A Possible Convergence?

Optimality Theory and the Minimalist Program

The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000) and Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, 2004) are not alternative theories logically inconsistent with each other. Optimality Theory is a theory of how universal constraints of grammar interact (Prince and Smolensky 1993, Grimshaw 2005). Minimalism, as Chomsky notes (2000:41), is a research program –not a theory– investigating to what extent...

Learnability in Optimality Theory

In this article we show how Optimality Theory yields a highly general Constraint Demotion principle for grammar learning. The resulting learning procedure specifically exploits the grammatical structure of Optimality Theory, independent of the content of substantive constraints defining any given grammatical module. We decompose the learning problem and present formal results for a central subp...

Prospects for a Radically Minimalist Ot: towards a Learning Algorithm 1

This paper has a simple and at the same time ambitious purpose: to open the door for mathematical learning algorithms in a Radically Minimalist crash-proof version of Optimality Theory. This objective will be pursued with Minimalism as a program -not as a theoryin its most radical version; and the theoretical substance will be provided by OT. A secondary but not less important aim of this paper...

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

Convergence of trajectories in infinite horizon optimization

In this paper, we investigate the convergence of a sequence of minimizing trajectories in infinite horizon optimization problems. The convergence is considered in the sense of ideals and their particular case called the statistical convergence. The optimality is defined as a total cost over the infinite horizon.