Syllable types in cross-linguistic and developmental grammars

In Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) both language acquisition and language typology can be accommodated. The basic assumption is that constraints are universal, but that the rankings of these constraints are language particular. For language typology the idea is that different rankings reflect different (possible) languages. For acquisition the idea is that the learner needs to acquire the languagespecific ranking of his mother tongue. The assumption here, like in most other work on acquisition to date (cf. Gnanadesikan 1995, Tesar & Smolensky 1996), is that structural constraints initially outrank faithfulness constraints. The grammar in this state prefers structurally unmarked outputs over faithful ones. By promoting faithfulness in the ranking, or by demoting structural constraints, the outputs can become more marked and more faithful to their inputs.