How functional is OT?

[Martin Haspelmath]

I found Joan Bresnan's  remarks very interesting indeed, and I feel that
FUNKNET subscribers should pay close attention to the work that is going
on at Stanford and Santa Cruz.

I completely agree that OT says nothing about the nature of the
constraints, and that OT analyses with functionally-motivated
constraints are possible. In fact, people in Natural Morphology (W.
Wurzel, W. Dressler and colleagues) have been talking about the ranking
of functional principles for almost two decades.

But although especially in phonology more and more people seem to be
interested in functional explanations of OT constraints, it is also true
that most OT practitioners probably still think of constraints as
abstract entities that are directly innate and need not and cannot be
explained further.

If the new wave of (post-MIT) functionalism comes from Stanford/Santa
Cruz, that's great. And if you people there occasionally acknowledge
that some people have said similar things about language function
explaining language form before, that would be nice.

Martin

--
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Inselstr. 22
D-04103 Leipzig (Tel. (MPI) +49-341-9952 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616)