Optimality Theory 2
1 Conflict and Competition

Conflict implies competition
o If there are two conflicting requirements, then there must be at least two possible ways of doing
things
 Doing things so that A is satisfied, but not B
 Doing things so that B is satisfied, but not A
 Doing things so that neither A nor B are satisfied
 * doing things so that both A and B are satisfied
o From this point of view, linguistic variation is characterised as different (competing) ways of
doing things
o This is not the standard view
 Within one grammatical system, there is only one way to do things
o But there is evidence that there are choices within one grammatical system
 Sometimes we find free variation (optionality)
 he said (that) they left
 a man who everyone knows left – a man left who everyone knows
 nem tudom semit – semit nem tudom
 Sometimes in one language something is grammatical in one situation but another thing is
grammatical in another
 who will he ask – I don’t know who he will ask
2 Where do competitors come from?

In OT it is assumed that the Grammar contains a Generator (GEN) which is general enough to
produce a set of possible expressions (the candidate set)
o GEN  {candidates}
3 What limits competition?

If everything competed against each other there would be problems
o at best expressions could block other expressions which were completely unconnected
o at worst, entire languages would reduce to just one expression (Chomsky’s ‘ba’ problem)
 Thus what competes must be restricted
o Ideally only related expressions would compete against each other
 In OT, this is achieved by the input:
o Input  GEN  {candidates}
o This ensures that all the competing candidates are related to the same input and candidates which
are associated with different inputs do not compete
 What is in the input
o One possibility is that the input consists of the lexical material which competitors share
 But this would predict that unrelated candidates can still compete:
 John loves Mary – Mary loves John – Mary, John loves
 quickly John told Mary how to write – John told Mary how to write quickly
o There appears to be a need to include semantic information in the input
 This at least contains dependency relations between input elements
 loves
arg1 = John
arg2 = Mary
4 How to evaluate competitors

OT assumes a set of constraints
o These are essentially well-formedness filters
o Different candidates either conform to them or not
o Some constraints can be violated more than once by a given candidate
 A constraint which forbids movement will be violated by every instance of movement
 The constraints are ranked for each language
 The candidate set is evaluated by the set of constraints
o The evaluation process starts with the highest ranked constraint
 Those candidates which do worse on this are eliminated
 A candidate does worse than another if it violates a constraint more times
 Thus, only the best candidates survive to be evaluated by the next highest ranked constraint
o The same procedure is followed for the next constraint and the surviving candidates
 The winning candidate – the last one standing – is grammatical (optimal)
5 Some simple examples
Constraints:
Arg: arguments sit in argument positions
Wh: wh-elements precede their scope
Input: loves
arg1 = John
arg2 = who
Evaluation:
Arg Wh
 John loves who
*
who John loves *!
Wh Arg
John loves who *!
 who John loves
*
Constraints:
tense>neg: tense precedes negation
neg>V: negation precedes verb
* S(tranded) A(ffix): affixes cannot be stranded
* DoS(upport)
English
*SA tense neg *DoS
John –s not love Mary
*!
John not loves Mary
*!
John loves not Mary
*!
 John does not love Mary
*
French
*SA tense *DoS neg
John –s not love Mary
*!
John not loves Mary
*!
 John loves not Mary
*
John does not love Mary
*!
Danish
*SA neg *DoS tense
John –s not love Mary
*!
 John not loves Mary
*
John loves not Mary
*!
John does not love Mary
*!
6 Faithfulness

It seems that languages allow insertion and deletion of elements
o things which are not in the input are allowed to appear in the output (candidate)
o things which are in the input are allowed to not appear in the output
 How can we prevent anything from competing with anything?
 Faithfulness constraints
o Fill: don’t insert
o Parse: don’t delete
 These are violable constraints (and so are ranked with the others)
o But they make sure that unfaithful candidates never win unless there is the need to be unfaithful in
a particular way
o Therefore, not everything competes (evenly) with everything else
7 How many candidates?

In principle there can be an infinite number of candidates
o Processing problems
 Is it possible to determine the optimal candidate if the candidate set is infinite
 Answer: yes – but only if set is ordered
 Is the candidate set orderable>
 Answer: it is difficult to be sure
 One solution is to limit the number of candidates to a finite set
o Finite sets are searchable even if unordered
 Parse is compatible with this
 one can only delete a finite number of things
 Fill is incompatible
 one can add things indefinitely
8 Where is interpretation?

Following standard assumptions interpretation comes at the end of syntactic processes:
o input  GEN  {candidates}  Eval  optimal candidate  LF
 But the input contains all information for interpretation
o This is redundant:
 input information is used to produce expression
 expressions properties are used to recover input information
 It would be better if we assumed that interpretation was taken from the input
o input  GEN  {candidates}  Eval  optimal candidate 

LF
o This means that the realised expression has only an indirect relationship to its interpretation
 This is supported by the fact that there is a lot of variation concerning how much input
information is realised syntactically
 some languages have wh-fronting, others don’t
 some languages have arguments syntactically determined, others don’t