OT and functionalism

[Joan Bresnan]

Isn't this fun?  Too bad grades are due tomorrow.  I will be brief in
my reply to Fritz's message, since it piggybacks on Matthew's anyway,
to which I replied at length.

Fritz thinks that OT doesn't mesh with his conception of what
functionalism is, namely--

"... the sort of view advocated in Newmeyer (1998), in which, in a
global / historical sense, grammars reflect external forces, but
without each language-internal grammatical statement being tied to a
particular functional motivation.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. (1998). Language form and language function.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press."

My previous reply to Matthew Dryer applies just as well here,
so I won't repeat it.

But Fritz argues for this point in a peculiar way, by giving a failed
OT analysis of his own design, and blaming it on the framework.
(Hmmm... We certainly wouldn't accept this reasoning from a
student, would we? ...sorry, I have grades on my mind. :-))

He also makes several very general characterizations about OT
work, such as:

"OT analyses, particular in the realm of syntax, have, in general,
been rather circumscribed in their domain of application. Typically, they
focus on some little corner of the syntax, such as clitic order, auxiliary
inversion, and so on."

---and:

"The problem with the framework seems to be that it "falters when one
tries to apply it to a wide variety of disparate phenomena within a
particular language."

But Fritz hasn't really shown us this, has he?

It's a bit odd for Fritz to talk about grammatical coverage, since OT
syntax is still in its infancy, and the only formal grammatical frameworks
that have produced genuine wide coverage grammars of real languages
are the constraint-based lexicalist grammars in LFG, HPSG, etc.  which
are actively used in large-scale computational NLP projects and
applications.  (I am told that the Minimalist Program has advanced by
shrinking its coverage of a wide variety of disparate phenomena.)
 It might be of interest to those concerned about
wide-scale descriptive grammar coverage and OT that Jonas Kuhn (whose
work I referred to in previous postings) has implemented the Grimshaw
fragment of English syntax (on auxiliary inversion) in the XLE parser
at Stuttgart.  This is, of course, a toy fragment.  But his formal
analysis of the generation and recognition problem in OT-LFG now makes
it possible to generate, parse, and study real grammars of the sort
that have broad descriptive coverage.  This is a remarkable advance.
Have a look at:

http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~jonas/

This is just the beginning, but the new work coupling the
mathematically well defined group of constraint based grammars with
the OT model of constraint interaction seems promising to me.

TTFN--

Joan
P.S. Lest anyone get the impression that I am an advocate for OT, let
me repeat my warning that I am only a student of OT, and I'm only
doing it in my spare time (of which there isn't much).







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Joan Bresnan    bresnan at stanford.edu           ______     _`\<,_    _`\<,_
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