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 …

Doing Optimality Theory brings together examples and practical, detailed advice for
undergraduates and graduate students working in linguistics. Given that the basic premises …

Despite their apparently divergent accounts of higher cognition, cognitive theories based on
neural computation and those employing symbolic computation can in fact strengthen one …

There is an active debate within the field of phonology concerning the cognitive status of
substantive phonetic factors such as ease of articulation and perceptual distinctiveness. A …

Abstract Harmonic Grammar (HG) and Optimality Theory (OT) are closely related formal
frameworks for the study of language. In both, the structure of a given language is …

All languages have distributional regularities: patterns which restrict what sounds can
appear where, including nowhere, as determined by local syntagmatic factors independent …

The markedness constraints of classic Optimality Theory assign violation-marks to output
candidates without reference to the input or to other candidates. This article explores an …

Constraints on prosodic and syntactic well-formedness conflict with each other. This is
particularly evident in the expression of new information focus, where the best prosodic …

When a medial consonant cluster is simplified by deletion or place assimilation, the first
consonant is affected, but never the second one:/patka/becomes [paka] and …

Ranking and optimality are based on pairwise comparisons between a desired opti andits
competitors. The'comparativetableau'identifies the elements that figure in the ranking …