The past ten years have shown an ever-increasing revival of interest in phonological acquisition. The introduction of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) has played a major role in this revival. Both “markedness” and “constraints on outputs” have often figured in accounts of phonological development, and these concepts are central in OT. The most fundamental change is probably that ...

This tutorial presents an introduction to the contemporary linguistic framework known as optimality theory (OT). The basic assumptions of this constraint-based theory as a general model of grammar are first outlined, with formal notation being defined and illustrated. Concepts unique to the theory, including "emergence of the unmarked," are also described. OT is then examined more specifically ...

This paper is an attempt to determine the underpinnings of Optimality Theory (henceforth OT; Prince and Smolensky, 1993; McCarthy and Prince, 1993), and what logic might have to do with it.1 This is important because, without this kind of work, very strange misunderstandings of the theory crop up. The work reported here is preliminary, but nothing of this sort has previously been attempted for ...

Optimality Theory in Syntax Géraldine Legendre Within generative approaches to syntax, OT stands as an alternative theory of constraint interaction to the Principle-and-Parameter Theory (PPT) of Universal Grammar articulated in Chomsky (1981). Comparing both theories helps understand what OT syntax is and what it is not. The fundamental claim of OT is that universal well-formedness constraints ...

Generative phonology has been dominant for roughly fifty years (Chomsky & Halle 1968, etc.) with Optimality Theory (OT) being the prevailing framework in phonology for over a decade (Prince & Smolensky 2004, etc.). Both theories share the assumption that Universal Grammar (UG) provides an inventory of universal distinctive features; OT also assumes that UG provides an inventory of universal con...

We briefly introduce and discuss some criteria for optimal decisions. For the majority of this module, we consider a person’s utility for different options (or ‘rewards’ or ‘actions’) and, with uncertainty about the reward which will follow a specific decision, we aim at maximisation of the expected utility, which is actually the utility of the optimal decision (note that a decision is a gamble...

Optimality Theory is a constraint-based theory of phonology which allows constraints to conflict and to be violated. Consequently, implementing the theory presents problems for declarative constraint-based processing frameworks. On the basis of two regularity assumptions, that sets are regular and that constraints can be modelled by transducers, this paper presents and proves correct algorithms...