It has been argued that rule-based phonological descriptions can uniformly be expressed as mappings carried out by finite-state transducers, and therefore fall within the class of rational relations. If this property of generative capacity is an empirically correct characterization of phonological mappings, it should hold of any sufficiently restrictive theory of phonology, whether it utilizes ...

It was exactly 25 years ago that Paul Smolensky introduced Harmony Theory (Smolensky, 1986), a framework that would pursue an exciting, but certainly not straight path through linguistics (namely, Optimality Theory) and other cognitive domains. The goal of this workshop is not so much to look back to this path, but rather to discuss its potential continuation(s). Soon after its publication, Opt...

In this article, I survey the integrated connectionist/symbolic (ICS) cognitive architecture in which higher cognition must be formally characterized on two levels of description. At the microlevel, parallel distributed processing (PDP) characterizes mental processing; this PDP system has special organization in virtue of which it can be characterized at the macrolevel as a kind of symbolic com...

This paper deals with the architectural issues of pragmatics within an overall account of natural language in optimality theory. It is argued that pragmatics can be seen as an optimisation problem described by its own constraint system which lies outside the constraint system that defines grammar (the production oriented OT models of syntax and phonology). Speaking and hearing both involve gram...

We present a recently proposed theory of grammar, Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1991, 1993). The principles of OT derive in large part from the high-level principles governing computation in connectionist networks. The talk proceeds as follows: (1) we summarize OT and its applications to UG. The we present (2) learning and (3) parsing algorithms for OT. Finally, (4) we show how cruc...

1. Introduction. SVO, SOV, VSO and VOS are all well-attested basic word orders in different languages. It is not clear however how to formally motivate why this type of variation at the base exists. In this paper, I intend to look at unmarked word orders in different languages and explain why there is variation at the base. I will propose an analysis within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolens...

The question of the proper treatment of clitics has received considerable attention in recent literature on the syntax-morphology and morphology-phonology interfaces (e.g., Marantz 1988, 1989, Zec and Inkelas 1992, Schütze 1994, Selkirk 1996, and references cited there). Selkirk (1996) proposes an elegant theory of the prosodification of clitic function words crosslinguistically, demonstrating ...

Primitive Optimality Theory (OTP) (Eisner, 1997a; Albro, 1998), a computational model of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993), employs a finite state machine to represent the set of active candidates at each stage of an Optimality Theoretic derivation, as well as weighted finite state machines to represent the constraints themselves. For some purposes, however, it would be convenient ...