This paper provides an overview of Linear Optimality Theory (LOT), a variant of Optimality Theory (OT) designed for the modeling of gradient acceptability judgment data. We summarize the empirical properties of gradient data that have been reported in the experimental literature, and use them to motivate the design of LOT. We discuss LOT’s notions of constraint competition and optimality, as we...

The notion of part of speech dates back at least to 5th century BC Sanskrit grammar (Matilal, 1990, ch.3) and is adopted in one form or another by most current linguistic theories. In spite of this, no objective definition for part of speech labels has ever been put forth (Croft, 1984, 2001; Langacker, 1987; Aarts, 2007). The present work explores the idea that parts of speech and their syntact...

Motivation Graded Grammaticality Je soutiens ma thèse de doctorat *Je soutiens mon thèse de le doctorat *Moi thèse soutenir de le doctorat mon I am the chair of my department *Me are the chair of my department *Me are chair the me's department of Motivation An adequate linguistic theory will have to recognize degrees of grammaticalness (Chomsky, 1975) Anyone who knows a natural language knows t...

In a recent trend, phonologists are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that many phonological processes are variable (Labov 1972, 1994), gradient (Hayes 2000, Frisch et al. 2004), and full of exceptions (Zimmer 1969, Zuraw 2000). This is not only because variability, gradience, and exceptions have been shown to be par for the course for many lexical patterns in phonology, but also because ...

In the construction of lexicons or word sense inventories, researchers have usually strived to de ne a set of disjoint senses for a word; however, there is increasing evidence that this is impossible in the general case. In this programmatic paper, we support this point with sense overlap data from manual sense annotation. We then sketch the road towards a fundamentally graded representation of...

Multiple cues interact to signal multiple functions in intonation simultaneously, which makes intonation notoriously complex to analyze. The Autosegmental-Metrical model for intonation analysis has proved to be an excellent vehicle for separating the components, but evidence for the phonetics/phonology dichotomy on which it hinges has proved elusive. Advocating a multidisciplinary approach, thi...

Experimental work has established that when subjects judge the phonological wellformedness of nonsense forms, they are strongly affected by the frequency of the phonological elements of the form and by the number of actual words that such a form is similar to. These results challenge phonological theory by suggesting a central role for frequency and the lexicon. In this paper, I review these re...