This work discusses many optimization and linguistic issues in great detail. It treats the history of a variety of languages, including English, French, Germanic, Galician/ Portuguese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish and shows that the application of Optimality Theory allows for innovative and improved analyses. It contains a complete bibliography on OT and language change. It is of interest to historical linguists, researchers into OT and linguistic theory, and phonologists and syntacticians with an interest in historical change.

Explains and explores the central premises of OT and the results of their praxis.

This book is about how languages change. It is also a devastating critique of a widespread linguistic orthodoxy. April McMahon argues that to provide a convincing explanation of linguistic change the roles of history and contingency must be accommodated in linguistic theory. She also shows that theoretical work in related disciplines can be used to assess the value of such theories. Optimality Theory, or OT as it is usually called, dominates contemporary phonology, especially in the USA, and is becoming increasingly influential in syntax and language acquisition. Having set out its basis principles, Professor McMahon assesses their explanatory power in analysing language change and its residues in current phonological systems. Using cross-linguistic data, and drawing comparisons with other theories inside and outside linguistics, she shows that OT is incapable of accounting for language change, without the addition of rules and an appreciation of chance and historical contingency that would then undermine its theoretical underpinnings. OT relies on innateness and needs to discuss the origins of allegedly genetically-specified features.; The author considers the nature and evolution of the human language capacity, and demonstrates a profound mismatch between the predictions of evolutionary biology and the claims for innateness made in OT.

The contributions of this book deal with the issue of language variation. They all share the assumption that within the language faculty the variation space is hierarchically constrained and that minimal changes in the set of property values defining each language give rise to diverse outputs within the same system. Nevertheless, the triggers for language variation can be different and located at various levels of the language faculty. The novelty of the volume lies in exploring different loci of language variation by including wide-ranging empirical perspectives that cover different levels of analysis (syntax, phonology and prosody) and deal with different kinds of data, mostly from Romance and Germanic languages, from dialects, idiolects, language acquisition, language attrition and creolization, analyzed from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. The volume is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to synchronic variation in phonology and syntax; the second part deals with diachronic variation and language change, and the third part investigates the role of contact, attrition and acquisition in giving rise to language change and language variation in bilingual settings. This volume is a useful tool for linguistics of diverse theoretical persuasions working on theoretical and comparative linguistics and to anyone interested in language variation, language change, dialectology, language acquisition and typology.

Bidirectional Optimality Theory (BiOT) emerged at the turn of the millennium as a fusion of Radical Pragmatics and Optimality Theoretic Semantics. It stirred a wealth of new research in the pragmatics-semantics interface and heavily influenced e.g. the development of evolutionary and game theoretic approaches. Optimality Theory holds that linguistic output can be understood as the optimized products of ranked constraints. At the centre of BiOT is the insight that this optimisation has to take place both in production and interpretation, and that the production-interpretation cycle has to lead back to the original input. BiOT is now generally interpreted as a description of diachronically stable and cognitively optimal form–meaning pairs. It found applications beyond the semantics-pragmatics interface in language acquisition, historical linguistics, phonology, syntax, and typology. This book provides a state of the art overview of these developments. It collects nine chapters by leading scientists in the field.

This book is about how languages change. It is also a devastating critique of a widespread linguistic orthodoxy. April McMahon argues that to provide a convincing explanation of linguistic change the roles of history and contingency must be accommodated in linguistic theory. She also shows that theoretical work in related disciplines can be used to assess the value of such theories. Optimality Theory, or OT as it is usually called, dominates contemporary phonology, especially in the USA, and is becoming increasingly influential in syntax and language acquisition. Having set out its basis principles, Professor McMahon assesses their explanatory power in analysing language change and its residues in current phonological systems. Using cross-linguistic data, and drawing comparisons with other theories inside and outside linguistics, she shows that OT is incapable of accounting for language change, without the addition of rules and an appreciation of chance and historical contingency that would then undermine its theoretical underpinnings. OT relies on innateness and needs to discuss the origins of allegedly genetically-specified features. The author considers the nature and evolution of the human language capacity, and demonstrates a profound mismatch between the predictions of evolutionary biology and the claims for innateness made in OT.

Doing Optimality Theory brings together examples and practical, detailed advice for undergraduates and graduate students working in linguistics. Given that the basic premises of Optimality Theory are markedly different from other linguistic theories, this book presents the analytic techniques and new ways of thinking and theorizing that are required. Explains how to do analysis and research using Optimality Theory (OT) - a branch of phonology that has revolutionized the field since its conception in 1993 Offers practical, in-depth advice for students and researchers in the field, presented in an engaging way Features numerous examples, questions, and exercises throughout, all helping to illustrate the theory and summarize the core concepts of OT Written by John J. McCarthy, one of the theory’s leading proponents and an instrumental figure in the dissemination and use of OT today An ideal guide through the intricacies of linguistic analysis and research for beginning researchers, and, by example, one which will lead the way to future developments in the field.

制約の相互作用に基づく再ランキングの解明

This book presents an account of object shift, a word order phenomenon found in most of the Scandinavian languages where an object occurs unexpectedly to the left and not to the right of a sentential adverbial. With new and original observations, it is an important addition to the fields of phonology, optimality theory and theoretical syntax.

There is a growing awareness that a fruitful cooperation between the (diachronic and synchronic) study of language variation and change and work in phonological theory is both possible and desirable. The study of language variation and change would benefit from this kind of cooperation on the conceptual and theoretical levels. Phonological theory may well profit from a greater use of what is commonly called ‘external evidence’. This volume contains contributions by outstanding representatives from the more data-oriented fields and phonological theory. They discuss possibilities and problems for a further integration of both areas, by considering questions such as where and to which extent the two may need each other, and whether there is a need for an interdisciplinary conceptual framework and methodology. Attention is also paid to questions regarding the cause and actuation, linguistic constraints and the internal spread of linguistic change, as well as to possible and impossible processes of language change.