Optimality Theoretic Syntax: a radical approach
Joan Bresnan
Department of Linguistics
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
(bresnan@stanford.edu)
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/bresnan/
Prerequisites: Participants should have some familiarity with
syntactic theory, such as a prior course in syntax. Some
acquaintance with unification-based formalisms would be useful. OT
syntax will be introduced in a reasonably self-contained way.
Summary: The classical generative theory of knowledge of language is that a speaker's
mental grammar is a pure combinatorial engine, blind to typology and resistant
to grammar-external forces. It arises from domain-specific innate principles
of UG, whose parametric variation becomes fixed upon exposure to a given
linguistic experience. In this classical epistemology, markedness hierarchies
such as the animacy hierarchy cannot play a role in the individual synchronic
grammar of a present-day English speaker. These hierarchies are not
universal; they are exception-ridden, both across languages and even within
the individual languages where their effects sometimes appear.
The emergence of Optimality Theory, particularly stochastic OT, has
introduced new ways of thinking about these fundamental issues, in
phonology and syntax alike. The OT architecture provides a very
natural way of capturing the softness and emergent quality of
universal markedness hierarchies, modelling substantive
functional/typological theories of linguistic structure, and
integrating variation and change into the general theory.
(Excerpted and paraphrased from Bresnan and Aissen (2002) "Optimality and
Functionality: Conjectures and Refutations", Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory, 81--95.)
In this lecture series I will first introduce (classical, vanilla) OT
by showing how it explains 'emergence of the unmarked'
effects, typological asymmetries, and morphosyntactic inventories. I will
then show how OT augmented with stochastic evaluation (Boersma 1998)
can capture generalizations across hard and soft syntactic constraints
that elude classical approaches.
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