[Fwd: Fwd: New Book: OPTIMALITY-THEORETIC SYNTAX-A DECLARATIVE APPROACH]

[Rob Malouf]

Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 13:39:17 -0700
To: hpsg-l at lists.stanford.edu
From: Christine Sosa <sosa at csli.stanford.edu>
Subject: New Book: OPTIMALITY-THEORETIC SYNTAX-A DECLARATIVE APPROACH

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the publication of:

OPTIMALITY-THEORETIC SYNTAX-A DECLARATIVE APPROACH, Jonas Kuhn (the
University of Texas at Austin) ;paper ISBN: 1-57586-426-6, $25.00,
cloth ISBN: 1-57586-425-8, $70.00,  252 pages, copyright 2003 by
CSLI Publications. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email:
pubs at csli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736  (U.S. & Canada only)
or order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

Optimality Theory (OT) has become a widely used grammatical
framework for stating generalizations and exploring their empirical
predictions across languages. OT has been applied in many subfields
of the study of grammar, but the level of detail to which the
architecture has been used differs from area to area.

This book explores important choices in the design of a formally
precise OT approach to syntax.  The author proposes an architecture
that meets the requirements of linguistic expressiveness while also
being computationally well-behaved. Building on OT work that uses
the representation structures of Lexical Functional Grammar
(OT-LFG), this book defines the notion of an OT-syntactic grammar in
a declarative, non-derivational way.  Along with the standard OT
architecture, which is based on a generation metaphor, the author
also formalizes parsing-based OT and goes on to discuss possible
combinations of these two architectures. This is followed by an
examination of assumptions under which the computational tasks of
generation and parsing are decidable for an OT-syntactic grammar.


"This is an unusually clearly written and exceptionally important
book, which demonstrates both the computational problems of OT
syntax and outlines solutions."  -- Joan Bresnan, Sadie Dernham
Patek Professor of Humanities and Professor of Linguistics, Stanford
University

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