optimality theory

Wataru Nakamura nakamura at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU
Tue Feb 13 15:25:19 UTC 1996


Hi! I am very glad to know that there are some functionalists out there who
are interested in OT. I got interested in OT for the same reason: obvious
similarity between dominance hierarchy (OT) and implicational hierarchy and
markedness. It is true that OT is compartible with any framework, formal or
functional. I know a few papers and presentations which try to apply OT to
LFG and (even) Relational Grammar (Legendre forthcoming) in addition to GB
or Minimalist. This is actually what Smolensky told me when I asked whether
OT is compatible with functional frameworks. He even suggested that OT is
compatible with Cognitive Grammar. However, despite the fact that OT is
multi-stratal (McCarthy 1993 and others), OT seems to me to be more
compatible with non-derivational, functional frameworks than derivational,
formal ones. I remember I was really dissapointed when I listened to
Smolensky's lecture which tried to combine GB with OT.
        I think OT is of great interest to functionalists, especially its
concept of dominance hierarchy (each constraint has absolute priority over
all the lower constraints). I myself applied OT to case marking (a la
Legendre et al 1993) using Role and Reference Grammar (Nakamura 1995,
forthcoming). OT works nicely when there is a conflict among constraints.
        OT seems to suffer (like any other framework) some problems, the
most notable is how to constrain constraint rankings. This is a really
serious problem which as far as I know remains unsolved.
        I am not sure how to situate OT in a broader context, but Gregory
Guy (in his leacture he gave at Buffalo) contrasted OT with Variable Rule
Model and argued that OT should be included into the latter, since OT is
non-categorical & deterministic, while Variable Rule Model is non-categorical
& non-deterministic. I suspect the same applies to the relation between OT
and Competition Model. My tebtative conclusion is that OT is a good symbolic
approximation of connectionism and that it could serve as a bridge between
linguistics and connectionism. These two observations may sound dumb to
many people, since OT grew out of connectionism.


Wataru Nakamura

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Wataru Nakamura
Dept.of Linguistics
685 Baldy Hall
SUNY at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260-1030
U.S.A.



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