OT and functionalism

[Matthew S Dryer]

The recent discussion of OT and functionalism misses what to me is an
essential difference between OT and the relation of functional
explanation, particularly competing motivations, to grammar.  In OT, as I
understand it, the constraints are "in" the grammar, either in the sense
that the constraints are stipulated for particular languages, or in the
sense that the grammar of the language makes reference to universal
constraints, for example in specifying which constraints outrank which
other constraints.

But on my view, grammars of languages do not make reference to functional
principles or motivations.  For example, if two languages have a
difference that one might describe in terms of economic motivation
competing with iconic motivation, where economic motivation wins out in
one language and iconic motivation in the other, I would not want to say
that there are grammatical rules in these languages that refer to economy
or to iconicity.

To put the point another way, functional principles and motivations apply
primarily at the level of the evolution of particular languages.  If
economic motivation has won out over iconic motivation with respect to
some aspect of the grammar of a particular language, that means that over
the past few thousand years, the particular grammatical changes that have
led to the current state of the language reflect the influence of that
functional principle.  But once that has happened, the grammatical rules
have an existence that is independent of the explanatory principles that
have influenced them.

OT shares with theories in the GB tradition of trying to build explanation
for why languages are the way they are into the grammars themselves.  From
my perspective, this is deeply misguided.  Languages are highly complex
systems, whose properties reflect the interaction of diverse explanatory
principles, and I believe that they can and should be described in terms
that are independent of the explanatory principles that underlie them.

While there are a wide variety of approaches which have been labeled
"functionalist", OT as I understand it is fundamentally incompatible with
the type of functionalism that I and many others espouse.

Matthew Dryer