OT sources [was: Re: more English orthography]

On Thu, 18 May 2000, Roger Mills wrote:

> Speaking of that:  a month or two back, someone (I think Dirk Elzinga)
> mentioned 2 intro textbooks that dealt with Optimality Theory.  I can't
> locate the post, or my notes.  Could someone refresh my memory?
Try these:

Archangeli, Diana, and D. Ternece Langedoen, eds. 1997.
_Optimality Theory: An Overview_. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, Inc. ISBN: 0631202269 (pbk).

This is just what it says--an overview of Optimality Theory.
There are papers by several linguists introducing OT approaches
in different areas of grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax)

Hammond, Michael. 1999. _The Phonology of English: A Prosodic
Optimality-Theoretic Approach_. New York: Oxford University
Press, Inc. ISBN: 0198700296 (pbk).

This contains a very clear introduction to Optimality Theory in
addition to providing an analysis of English prosodic phonology.
It's full of distributional data on English consonants and
vowels, and contains an extended discussion of English syllable
structure and stress assignment.

Kager, Rene. 1999. _Optimality Theory_. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press. ISBN 0521589800 (pbk).

This is the first textbook designed to introduce students to OT.
I've only browsed it, but it seems to be a reasonable
presentation.

If you're really interested, point your web browser to
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/roa.html. This is an electronic archive
of papers dealing with OT. Some are really good, some are pretty
bad. There are several dissertations in there as well using OT
as the analytical framework. It's very helpful to have a good
grounding in generative approaches to phonology if you want to
get anything out of these papers.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu