Optimality Theory is an approach to linguistic problems which is based on rules with exceptions, resorting to a ranking among rules to resolve conflicts arising from competing rules. In such a way, dealing with linguistic problems amounts to applying rules with exceptions: That is reasoning. A related issue is then about a formalization of the logic at work. An immediate candidate is Default Lo...

would argue that writing a rule does not constitute a solution to a problem, but merely a statement of it. His thinking at that time was bringing about the shift of focus that he will later describe as the second major revolutionary convulsion in the study of language-the move from systems of rules to systems of principles, the first one having been the introduction of generative grammar itself...

This document contains the abstracts for the accepted presentations. Note that these abstracts are the unedited versions, as we received them from the authors.

This paper provides a brief algebraic characterization of constraint violations in Optimality Theory (OT). I show that if violations are taken to be multisets over a fixed basis set Con then the merge operator on multisets and a ‘min’ operation expressed in terms of harmonic inequality provide a semiring over violation profiles. This semiring allows standard optimization algorithms to be used f...

An idempotent phonological grammar maps phonotactically licit forms faithfully to themselves. This paper establishes tight sufficient conditions for idempotency in (classical) Optimality Theory. Building on Tesar (2013), these conditions are derived in two steps. First, idempotency is shown to follow from a general formal condition on the faithfulness constraints. Second, this condition is show...

Bob Frank, Giorgio Satta, and Lauri Karttunen stunned the computational OT community some years ago when they pointed out that unidirectional optimization is essentially a finite state technique. If all components of an OT system can be modeled by a finite state machine, then the complexity of the entire system does not exceed the complexity of its components. There has been some debate in past...

This article surveys research in Spanish phonology from the perspective of Optimality Theory, a formal linguistic framework based on ranked and violable constraints. Theoretical insights from OT enrich our understanding of Spanish phonology, and Spanish data also figure prominently in the latest theoretical developments within OT. The article concludes with areas for ongoing research and a bibl...

As [5] and [11] have shown, some applications of Optimality Theory can be modelled using finite state algebra provided that the constraints are regular. However, their approaches suffered from an upper bound on the number of constraint violations. We present a method to construct finite state transducers which can handle an arbitrary number of constraint violations using a variant of the tropic...

Since Kiparsky (1968) it has been standard practice in generative phonology to account for sound change by means of rule addition, rule simplification, rule reordering and rule loss. Given that the phonological rule as such no longer exists in recently proposed constraint-based theories of phonology, such as Optimality Theory (cf. Prince and Smolensky (1993), McCarthy and Prince (1993a and b), ...