Cooperating constructions

Optimality theoretic (OT) syntax (Dekkers et al. 2000, Legendre et al. 2000, Sells 2001) is an important development in the world of constraint based grammar, because it introduces a new way of looking at constraint interactions. The leading idea is that not all constraints are “surface true” – constraints may be violated when they have to be in order to satisfy some more important, higher ranking constraint. This opens up an interesting new way of looking at mismatch phenomena. A mismatch arises when a constraint imposing ‘match’, a correspondence between grammatical modules or levels, must be violated in order to satisfy some higher ranking module internal constraints. OT also suggests a natural way for integrating functional motivations into formal theories of grammar. If the constraints are appropriately grounded in functional considerations, then an OT grammar is the consequence of finding a balance among various competing communicative drives. Cases of mismatch that arise out of this competition can be seen as a direct outcome of conflicting functional pressures. Unfortunately, however, the fit between OT and constraint based grammar is not entirely comfortable. Informally, one can sketch the logic of OT constraint interaction as follows (Prince and Smolensky 1993). First, start with a partial representation of an utterance (say, something like logical form). From this partial representation, generate the complete (usually infinite) set of possible complete representations that can be built from the input. Next, evaluate each of these candidate representations with respect to the highest ranked constraint, and eliminate any