Re: THEORY: OT Syntax (Was: Re: THEORY: phonemes and Optimality Theory tutorial)

Dirk:
> On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, jesse stephen bangs wrote:
>
> > Huh.  One of the first advantages of OT that was touted to me was the lack
> > of ordered rules, rule ordering deemed to be unnatural.  You obviously do
> > have ordered (or ranked) rules, though.
>
> These aren't rules; these are constraints. Constraints are statements
> about allowed or disallowed structures, not instructions for changing
> one structure to another.
To the best of my knowledge, all linguists who speak of 'rules' as something
not to be rejected in favour of constraints use 'rules' as a synonym for
'constraints'. 'Thou shalt not kill' is a rule, but it is a constraint,
not an instruction for changing one thing to another. More to the
point, whenever I've had the opportunity to interrogate a linguist who
likes to talk in terms of one structure changing into another, they (rightly,
in my view) claim this to simply be a convenient metaphor for describing
constraints pertaining to the relationship between two structures.

Hence I take the claim that such and such a model does away with rules to
be vacuous. AFAICS, the only special thing about OT is the way it resolves
competing constraints by means of ranking, and resolution by means of
ranking is different from (or at least, simpler than) resolution by means
of subconstraint (i.e. an extra constraint that stipulates what happens
in case of a clash of 2 other constraints) only when the competition
between constraints arises in lots of different circumstances that can't
all be accounted for by a single subconstraint.

Not that I've anything against the idea of ranked constraints; I'm just
mystified at how this simple idea burgeoned into the huge industry that
is OT (in the USA). The obvious answer is sociopolitical, career-savvyness,
bandwagon joining, and then the natural tendency of graduate students to
continue doing what their teachers teach. But can such a huge academic
juggernaut have such a flimsy intellectual basis, in a discipline that is
fundamentally rational and quasiempirical?

It has been suggested that OT took off so because phonology was in the
doldrums, in comparison to syntax, but this seems wrong to me: the years
before Smolensky and Prince had seen a great flowering of superb theoretical
work in nonlinear phonology and the beginnings of attempts to explore
whether the mechanisms of theoretical syntax could be seen also to underlie
phonology.

--And.