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Summary: Despite being a recent development in generative linguistics, Optimality Theory (OT, Prince & Smolensky 1993) has had a profound impact on linguistics, particularly on phonology in North America. OT posits that observed forms of language arise due to conflicting linguistic constraints. When proposed in 1993, OT saw virtually overnight success in American phonology despite not having been the first theory of grammar to focus solely on the constraint. I argue, that the reasons for which OT saw such immediate success due in large part to the efforts of Prince and Smolensky to work at getting the word out, the state of American phonology at the time which felt stagnant to some, and the coincidence of OT's birth with the Internet Boom which Prince and Smolensky used to their advantage [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 determined by the relative strengths of a set of constraints. They differ in how these strengths are represented: as numerical weights (HG) or as ranks (OT). Weighted constraints have advantages for the construction of accounts of language learning and other cognitive processes, partly because they allow for the adaptation of connectionist and statistical models. HG has been little studied in generative linguistics, however, largely due to influential claims that weighted constraints make incorrect predictions about the typology of natural languages, predictions that are not shared by the more popular OT. This paper makes the case that HG is in fact a promising framework for typological research, and reviews and extends the existing arguments for weighted over ranked constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides two arguments that error-driven constraint-based grammars should not be learned by directly mirroring the frequency of constraint violation and satisfaction in the target words of a language. The first argument comes from a class of stages attested in phonological development, called Intermediate Faith (IF) stages, in which children produce marked structures only in privileged positions. Two such stages are presented and analyzed, from the literature on English and French L1 acquisition, and their learning consequences are examined. The second argument concerns the degree of restrictiveness that a learner's end-state grammar encodes, using two hypothetical interactions between learner's assumptions about hidden structure and developing constraint rankings that can trick a learner into adopting a superset grammar. These two arguments are used to support an approach called Error-Selective Learning (ESL), in which errors are learned and stored gradually, in a way that relies on violation frequency, but rankings themselves are learned in a non-gradual way (relying on the algorithms of ). It is also shown that violation frequencies can still cause problems regardless of a learner's method of grammatical evaluation—either ranked constraints as in Optimality Theory, or weighted constraints as in Harmonic Grammar. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines morphophonological alternations involving apicoalveolar tap-consonant clusters in Urban East Norwegian from the framework of gestural Optimality Theory. Articulatory Phonology provides an insightful explanation of patterns of vowel intrusion, coalescence, and rhotic deletion in terms of the temporal coordination of consonantal gestures, which interacts with both prosodic and morphological structure. An alignment-based account of derived-environment effects is proposed in which complete overlap in rhotic-consonant clusters is blocked within morphemes but not across morpheme or word boundaries. Alignment constraints on gestural coordination also play a role in phonologically conditioned allomorphy. The gestural analysis is contrasted with alternative Optimality-theoretic accounts. Furthermore, it is argued that models of the phonetics–phonology interface which view timing as a low-level detail of phonetic implementation incorrectly predict that input morphological structure should have no effect on gestural coordination. The patterning of rhotic-consonant clusters in Norwegian is consistent with a model that includes gestural representations and constraints directly in the phonological grammar, where underlying morphological structure is still visible. On the assumption that Universal Grammar lacks faithfulness constraints on input timing, the phonology is free to include non-contrastive phonetic detail such as intersegmental gestural coordination without the danger of overgenerating impossible contrasts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The author of this article comments on some phonological issues concerning the Comparative Markedness theory and Optimality Theory in linguistics. The author argues against a theoretical approach in which all surface forms are generated by the grammar in the form of rules or constraints. It has been suggested that at least some observable sound patterns are not generated by the grammar. Rather, the alternations are memorized as less abstract forms and stored in the lexicon as such. In this approach, the distinction between grammar and lexicon basically amounts to a distinction between productive phonological processes and memorized lexical alternations, a not uncommon assumption in traditional generative phonology.

The past ten years have shown an ever-increasing revival of interest in phonological acquisition. The most fundamental change is probably that Optimality Theory (OT) has reinstated continuity developmental grammars and final adult grammars have the same representational units and organizational principles. The development from an initial grammar to a final grammar had been pictured as a continuous process. In OT the basic idea is that constraints are innate and universal and come with an initial ranking where all markedness constraints outrank all faithfulness constraints. The learner needs to acquire the language-specific ranking of these constraints. By subsequent rerankings, the initial grammar gradually develops into the target-appropriate final grammar. With this state-of-the-art paper in mind, a survey was sent out to a large group of people involved in research on phonological acquisition. They were asked, among other things, what they thought the "state of the art" of the field was, and in which directions the field should proceed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]