This book describes Optimality Theory from the top down, explaining and exploring the
central premises of OT and the results that follow from them. Examples are drawn from …

In Optimality Theory, constraints come in two types, which are distinguished by their mode of
evaluation. Categorical constraints are either satisfied or not; a categorical constraint …

Why is it preferable to say salt and pepper over pepper and salt? Based on an analysis of
692 binomial tokens from online corpora, we show that a number of semantic, metrical, and …

Dialects are constantly changing, and due to increased mobility in more recent years,
European dialects have'levelled', making it difficult to distinguish a native of Reading from a …

The past two decades have seen the development of several constraint-based models of
phonological grammar that can handle variable phenomena. Most of these models …

In recent years, there have been several attempts to understand language variation from the
perspective of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). 1 This chapter has three …

In the past two decades, variation has received a lot of attention in mainstream generative
phonology, and several different models have been developed to account for variable …

The classical generative theory of knowledge of language is that a speaker's mental
grammar is a pure combinatorial engine, blind to ty-pology and resistant to grammar …

The metaphor of a 'language island'1 was coined with reference to the 'colonies' of German-
speaking settlers in Eastern, Central, and South Eastern Europe, which were mostly founded …

This paper studies the external sandhi rules Degemination, Elision, and Diphthongization in
Brazilian Portuguese. It is shown that, when the second vowel of a VV sequence carries the …