How Functional is OT?

[Joan Bresnan]

>>>jmacfarl at unm.edu said:
 >
 > As I understand it, OT posits innate or a-priori constraints on the
 > well-formedness of linguistic structure.  This leaves me confused
 > when people refer to OT as a functional theory.
 >
 > For example, in Bresenan's description of her work....
 >
 > We are arguing for using typologically motivated and functionally
 > grounded constraints, much as has happened in phonology.
 >
 > My question is how does "function" inform "constraints" if these
 > constraints are said to be innate or a-priori?

Oh, dear.  There's so much confusion about this topic.  I'm afraid of
stepping into a FUNKpit.   Well, here goes nothing...

1. Constraints can be innate without being a priori.  For example, the
possible inventories of phonological segments and the distribution of
phonological contrasts within and across languages reflect constraints
imposed by the limits of our articulatory and perceptual systems,
which are innate in the sense that we are born with them.  The work of
Paul Boersma (http://fonsg3.let.uva.nl/paul/), Donca Steriade
(http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/steriade/steriade.htm),
and Edward Flemming (http://www.stanford.edu/~flemming/) is
representative.  For example, Steriade's web page says:

   Donca Steriade works mainly on the interactions between
   phonological patterns and speech properties considered to be
   exclusively phonetic or even non-linguistic, such as perceptibility
   and avoidance of articulatory effort. The work is based on the
   hypothesis that these factors play a role in shaping sound patterns,
   not only in an evolutionary sense--as argued by John Ohala and Bjorn
   Lindblom--but also by defining the grammatical constraints whose
   interactions yield the phonologies of individual languages.

In an analogous way, markedness hierarchies in syntax and semantics
(Silverstein, Givon, Comrie et al.) have been postulated to reflect
innate properties of the human perceptual and cognitive systems.
--Not necessarily language-specific properties, but part of the
perceptual/cognitive apparatus people are born with.  For some VERY
BEGINNINGS of OT work incorporating constraints of this kind, have a
look at the background papers by Aissen and Bresnan on our Optimal
Typology web site at Stanford: http://www-ot.stanford.edu/ot/.

2.  Constraints can be innate without having language-specificity.  (See
the discussion on this very list some time ago, in which important
distinctions about innateness and language specificity were made by
Liz Bates, among others... don't you remember it?)

3. And constraints can be universal without being innate.
Examples would be pragmatic constraints on reference, communicative
constraints that influence discourse organization, cohesion, etc.

--------
OT is really a theory of constraint INTERACTION, not a theory of what
the substance of constraints must be, or where they must come from.
You can certainly invent as many a priori, autonomous, artificial,
mechanical, etc., constraints as you like (and many have...).  But you
don't have to.

Explicit constraints within a precise (I'm afraid to use the word
"formal" on this list!) theory of constraint interaction are useful in
that they enable you to experiment with prioritizing constraints in
order to generate typologies and test language-particular interactions
of constraints.  Boersma's model adds the nice refinement of
probabilistically variable ranking to the constraints.  See Boersma
and Hayes' recent paper in the Rutgers Optimality Archive.

-------
TTFN--

Joan