Guest Editors' Introduction (special issue of Journal of Semantics on Optimality theoretic semantics)

Abstract

Optimality Theory (OT) was developed in the 1990s by Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky as a general theory of language and grammar. Crucial for OT is Smolensky's idea of identifying a connectionist notion of wellformedness (Harmony) with linguistic well-formedness. In OT a grammar consists of a set of well-formedness constraints. These constraints apply to representations of linguistic structures simultaneously. Moreover, they are soft, which means violable and potentially conflicting. At least an important subpart of these constraints is assumed to be shared by all languages. Individual languages rank these universal constraints differently in such a way that higher-ranked constraints have total dominance over lowerranked constraints. Possible output candidates for each underlying form are evaluated by means of these constraint rankings. The output that best satisfies the constraints is the optimal candidate and will be realized.