OT and functional explanation

[Frederick Newmeyer]

Joan Bresnan's clarification of her position with respect to Martin
Haspelmath's was very helpful, but there may be differences that remain.
I've been able to discern a number of views out there with respect to the
'functionality' of OT constraints. Here are three of them:

(A)     Constraints are universal, and may or may not be functionally
motivated (e.g. Jane Grimshaw's LI paper, where the issue does not come
up).

(B)     Constraints are universal and functionally motivated (Martin
Haspelmath's forthcoming Z fuer S paper).

(C)     Constraints are universal and are the actual functional
motivations themselves. That is how I interpret the following remark from
Joan's December 10 posting: 'Couldn't conflicting constraints such as
iconicity and economy be universal, but prioritized differently across
different domains and different languages?'

Martin and Joan: does that put the finger on the different ways that you
view the constraints?

I'm an utter novice at OT, so the issue I will now raise could be based on
my own ignorance of that framework. If so, no doubt several of you will
tell me so. But I have trouble seeing how either (B) or (C) could be made
to work. My primary qualm comes from the fact that the forces (functional
or otherwise) that bring a construction into a language are not
necessarily the same ones that keep it there. An example:

English is a primarily head-initial right-branching language. There are
good functional reasons for a language to be 'consistent' in this regard
(Dryer, Hawkins, et al.). So a constraint for English like HEAD-LEFT (or
BRANCH-RIGHT) most certainly has a functional motivation. Now there are,
in fact, left-branching constructions in English: the GEN-N construction
is the best-known ('Mary's mother's uncle's lawyer'). A Grimshavian OT
analysis could license this by a constraint called 'GEN-N' (or whatever)
that would dominate HEAD-LEFT (the details are more complicated since
English also has N-GEN, but we can put them aside).

Now how might positions (B) or (C) handle this fact about English? I don't
know. As I understand the history of English, 1000+ years ago it was
largely left-branching, so the GEN-N construction was indeed functionally
motivated at one time. For whatever reason (and many have been suggested),
English has become largely right-branching. GEN-N survives as a
conventionalized relic of the days when it had a real functional
motivation. So, what does a functionally-oriented OT analysis do about
this? Surely it would not want to say that the constraint licensing this
left-branching structure is functionally motivated by parsing pressure,
since that is manifestly false. In that respect this construction is
counter-functional. Would the program necessitate finding some other
functional explanation for its existence? Is 'convention' admissible as a
category of functional motivation? (That would raise a host of problems,
no?)

I'm raising a number of questions, but don't mean to seem dogmatic about
the answers. Languages are filled with constructions that arose in the
course of history to respond to some functional pressure, but, as the
language as a whole changes, cease to be very good responses to that
original pressure. Such facts seem challenging to any theory (like
versions of OT that have been suggested) in which the sentences of a
language are a product of constraints that must be functionally motivated,
or are the actual functional motivations themselves.

--fritz newmeyer