This paper presents a novel forrealization of optimality theory. Unlike pre- yions treatments of optimality in computational linguistics, starting with Ellison (1994), the new approach does not require any explicit marking and counting of constraint violations. It is based on the notion of "lenient composition", defined as the combination of ordinary composition and priority union. If an underlying form has outputs that can meet a given constraint, lenient composition enforces the constraint; ff none of the output candidates meets the constraint, lenient composition allows all of them. For the sake of greater efficiency, we may "eniently compose" the a. relation and all the constraints into a single finite-state transducer that maps each underlying form directly into its op- timal surface realizations, and vice versa.. Seen from this perspective, optimality theory is surprisingly similar to the two older strains of finite-state phonology: classical rewrite systems and two-level models. In particular, the ranking of optimality constraints corresponds to the ordering of rewrite rules.

When I met Ed Stabler I was electrified by the types questions that he was asking of linguistic theories and even more so by the fact that he seemed to have an idea of how to answer those questions. Without his insight and generous assistance this dissertation would not have been written. I have also been extremely lucky to have Colin Wilson and Kie Zuraw on my committee. Colin has been an outstanding sounding board for ideas and has an uncanny ability to crash brittle models and find holes in theories. Kie’s superlative expository advice and willingness to work through the details of the most gory proofs have made this work much better and definitely clearer. My external member, Chuck Taylor, was also a great asset in encouraging me to take perspectives on linguistic issues that I otherwise wouldn’t have considered. UCLA has been a great place to work on a PhD. The community of students and faculty is always stimulating and supportive. Among the faculty that I owe the most thanks for making my time here rewarding and fun are: Bruce Hayes, for his numerous insightful comments on my work, both computational and otherwise; Pamela Munro, for being a friend and mentor and for showing me that languages aren’t quite as tidy as you might

Recent work has shown how basic ideas of the minimalist tradition intransformational syntax can be captured in a simple generative formalism, a"der:"AII] al minimalism." Thisfr]]I[L" can model "rel nant movement" analyses, which yield mor e complex antecedent-tr ace r elations, suggesting a new and significant sense in which linguistic str ctur esar "chain based." Michaelis (1998) showed that these grI] mar cor" spond to a certain kind of linear context free r write system, and this paper takes the next step of adapting ther ecognition methods for "non-concatenative"grOO[]" (Weir 1988; Seki et al., 1991; Boullier , 1999). This tur ns out to be quite straightforward once the grammars are set out appropriately.

Contents 1Preface 5 2 Finite recognizers of languages 6 3 Some early proposals 19 4 Using non-deterministic machines 34 5 One level phonology 41 6 Optimality theory: first ideas 62 7 OTP: Primitive optimality theory 76 Lenient compositions: the proper treatment of OT? 86 9 Acquisition models 91 10 Exercises and speculations 113 1 Stabler - Lx 236 1999 A web page of readin gs: 236: some readings the beauty of finite state machines and related topics Yu 1997 Regular languages. In Rozenberg & Salomaa, eds. Handbook of Formal Languages, Volume 1. Perrin 1990 Finite automata. In J. Van Leuwen, Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Volume B. Salomaa 1973 Formal Languages. Sec 5 Hopcroft and Ullman 1979 Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Comp