Kuhn book

[Tracy Holloway King]

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