OT

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Funknet,

  I think that a discussion on Funknet of the claims underlying OT could be
extremely helpful.  I agree with Joan Bresnan and Geffrey Nathan that there
is nothing afunctional about grounding constraints on the facts of the
perceptual and production apparatus.  On the contrary, it would seem to me
that the natural phonologies of Dressler, Bybee, Vennemann, Ohala, and others
make an interesting functional statement when they trace the grounding of
constraints on the speech production and perception apparatus.  I agree that
Hayes and others are doing a nice job of providing this type of grounding to
OT.  I promise to read the various sources that Joan points too, since I
imagine that they further elaborate this important contribution.

   However, as a psycholinguist, I have been disappointed by five crucial
"strategic" decisions in the development of OT that have tended to vitiate
its potential for constructing a psychologically plausible linguistic theory
of the type that Joan Bresnan and others have often sought.  In particular,
1.  Early on, OT was supposed to be linked to connectionist modeling.
However, after the first few years, this linkage was largely dropped.   Dedre
Gentner's interest in analogy as an acquisition or production mechanism has
pretty much suffered the same fate, I would guess.
2.  Early on, OT constraints were supposed to have strength levels.  However,
later on this feature was eliminated.  In our work on the Competition Model,
Liz Bates and I learned how important strength levels are for describing and
predicting psycholinguistic data.  In fact, one has to go beyond strength
levels for separate constraints and look at what we can conflict validity,
but none of this could possibly fit in with current OT.
3.  Early on, learning of a phonology (or grammar) could have involved the
strengthening and weakening of constraints.  Later on, it required the types
of triggers used by G-B and P&P theories.
4.  Even from the beginning, OT never questioned the need to provide a single
abstract underlying structure for each lexical item.  As far as I can tell,
this commitment is the one that tends to lead linguistic theories away from
being able to develop psychological reality.  Trying to preserve this
approach  in OT models of syntax would be equally problematic.
5.  At no point was OT really committed to an account of online processing.
If problems 1-4 were not present, I would not consider this a fatal flaw,
since the notion of constraint ordering has clear interest for typology and
language change, at the very least.

   I am just a psycholinguist, so I am happy to have linguists explain to me
how I have strayed in my judgments.  But I would really like to hear some
open discussion of these issues.  If it has already occurred on some OT
bulletin board, perhaps people can simply point me to an archived discussion
of these issues.

--Brian MacWhinney