In a series of papers, Petra Hendriks, Helen de Hoop and Henritte de Swart have applied optimality theory (OT) to semantics. These authors argue that there is a fundamental difference between the form of OT as used in phonology, morphology and syntax on the one hand and its form as used in semantics on the other hand. Whereas in the first case OT takes the point of view of the speaker, in the second case the point of view of the hearer is taken. The aim of this paper is to argue that the proper treatment of OT in natural language interpretation has to take both perspectives at the same time. A conceptual framework is established that realizes the integration of both perspectives. It will be argued that this framework captures the essence of the Gricean maxims and gives a precise explication of Atlas & Levinson`s (1981) idea of balancing between informativeness and efficiency in natural language processing. The ideas are then applied to resolve some puzzles in natural language interpret...

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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

Abstract Harmonic Grammar (HG) is a model of linguistic constraint interaction in which well-formedness is calculated as the sum of weighted constraint violations. We show how linear programming algorithms can be used to determine whether there is a weighting for a set of constraints that fits a set of linguistic data. The associated software package OT-Help provides a practical tool for studying large and complex linguistic systems in the HG framework and comparing the results with those of OT. We first describe the translation from Harmonic Grammars to systems solvable by linear programming algorithms. We then develop an HG analysis of ATR harmony in Lango that is, we argue, superior to the existing OT and rule-based treatments. We further highlight the usefulness of OT-Help, and the analytic power of HG, with a set of studies of the predictions HG makes for phonological typology.

A characteristic feature of conservative varieties of Tokyo Japanese (Hibiya 1999) is the interaction of a morphophonemic process of compound voicing with a general allophonic process of g-weakening. Given the current interest in parallelist approaches to the masking of certain phonological generalizations on the surface (dubbed “opacity ” in Kiparsky 1973), the immediate goal of this paper is to demonstrate that this interaction represents a type of opacity that cannot be described in an adequate way by means of Sympathy (McCarthy 1998), which has been suggested as a general and strictly parallelist tool to deal with all types of opacity in Optimality Theory (henceforth, OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993). Mistakenly put forth as an argument for Sympathy in our own earlier work (Ito & Mester 1997b) the case receives a superior understanding under familiar conservative assumptions, where the opacity arises naturally out of the serial interaction of the lexical and postlexical modules of phonology. Construed more broadly, this result constitutes an additional argument for the weakly parallel architecture of Optimality Theory argued for in Ito & Mester (to appear a,b), which maintains lexical and postlexical phonology as different and serially connected systems, without necessarily embracing the entirely separate assumption of serially connected levels within the lexical phonology itself argued for by Kiparsky 1998.

When a medial consonant cluster is simplified by deletion or place assimilation, the first consonant is affected, but never the second one: /patka / becomes [paka] and not *[pata]; /panpa / becomes [pampa] and not [panta]. This article accounts for that observation within a derivational version of Optimality Theory called Harmonic Serialism. In Harmonic Serialism, the final output is reached by a series of derivational steps that gradually improve harmony. If there is no gradual, harmonically improving path from a given underlying representation to a given surface representation, this mapping is impossible in Harmonic Serialism, even if it would be allowed in classic Optimality Theory. In cluster simplification, deletion or Place assimilation is the second step in a derivation that begins with deleting Place features, and deleting Place features improves harmony only in coda position.

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In this paper, I will give a detailed account of vowel harmony, disharmony, dissimilation, and elision in Yucatec Maya. These phenomena provide insights for the treatment of assimilation in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). The theoretical topics to be dealt with are (i) an adequate formalisation of phonological feature assimilation within Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995), and (ii) an account of morpheme-specific alternations within this framework. I will argue that harmony, or assimilation in general, surfaces due to a Faithfulness constraint family, 'Syntagmatic Identity', which establishes a correspondence relation between segmental or prosodic entities of the same type within one representation.