Iggy Roca (ed

Most of the papers in this collection derive from presentations at a workshop at the University of Essex in 1995. Except for Chapter 17, "Non-transparent Constraint Effects in Gere: From Cycles to Derivations" by Carole Paradis, the constraint-based papers assume some version of Optimality Theory (OT). However, in the spirit of the unbridled chaos reigning in the phonological realm, it is possible to find among these eighteen papers enough combinations and permutations of both rules and constraints, and derivational and non-derivational systems to please the most theoretically promiscuous phonologist around. Given the youth of OT at the time of the workshop, one might expect the current volume to be already somewhat obsolete. This is not the case—OT has not solved the opacity problem in an insightful manner, there is still debate over whether separate strata of constraints are required, and the scourge of functionalism continues to stalk the phonological landscape. Several papers in the volume are noteworthy in that they transcend the declared theme of comparing rule-based and constraint based theories by offering theory-independent insights. Rather than discussing all the papers, I have chosen to comment in more detail on a few representative ones.