Optimality Theory (OT) has had a lot of attention from the linguistics research community but also still largely lacks cognitive grounding. We used the ACT-R cognitive architecture to gain greater insight into the cognitive grounding issues that OT needs to address, most notably the GEN process and the learning of the constraint ranking. A generic ACT-R 5.0 model was developed guided by OT prin...

A central claim of Optimality Theory is that grammars may differ only in how conflicts among universal well-formedness constraints are resolved: a grammar is precisely a means of resolving such conflicts via a strict priority ranking of constraints. It is shown here how this theory of Universal Grammar yields a highly general Constraint Demotion principle for grammar learning. The resulting lea...

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An idempotent phonological grammar maps phonotactically licit forms faithfully to themselves. This paper establishes tight sufficient conditions for idempotency in (classical) Optimality Theory. Building on Tesar (2013), these conditions are derived in two steps. First, idempotency is shown to follow from a general formal condition on the faithfulness constraints. Second, this condition is show...

This paper applies the idea of a winner-take-all constraint satisfaction system like that found in Optimality Theory to human sentence parsing. Three sets of constraints, each of which is derived from a parsing theory from the current literature, are attempted. The empirical data considered here do not seem to be consistent with any of these theories. It is argued that a cumulative constraint w...

1. Introduction. SVO, SOV, VSO and VOS are all well-attested basic word orders in different languages. It is not clear however how to formally motivate why this type of variation at the base exists. In this paper, I intend to look at unmarked word orders in different languages and explain why there is variation at the base. I will propose an analysis within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolens...

In a series of recent publications (most notably Boersma (1998); see also Boersma and Hayes (2001)), Paul Boersma has developed a stochastic generalization of standard Optimality Theory in the sense of Prince and Smolensky (1993). While a classical OT grammar maps a set of candidates to its optimal element (or elements), in Boersma’s Stochastic Optimality Theory (StOT for short) a grammar defin...

The present chapter discusses Optimality-Theoretic approaches to language change in Spanish, reviewing a number of works that invoke not only the interaction of faithfulness and markedness constraints, but also the role of perceptual, cognitive, systemic and external influences on linguistic structure and change at the level of segment and segmental inventory, syllableand prosodic structure, an...

Weighted nite-state constraints that can count unboundedly many violations make Optimality Theory more powerful than nite-state transduction (Frank and Satta, 1998). This result is empirically and computationally awkward. We propose replacing these unbounded constraints, as well as nonnite-state Generalized Alignment constraints, with a new class of nite-state directional constraints. We give l...