USC Advanced Undergraduate Phonology ✳︎ Fall 2019 ✳︎ Smith


Optimality Theory: rankings, GEN, CON, and EVAL

I say I listen to all voices but mine’s the final decision. […] I hear the voices and I read the front page and I know the speculation but I’m the decider and I decide what is best."

George W. Bush

Optimality Theory

An /input/→[output] derivation in OT

Core proposals of OT

The architecture of an OT grammar

The lexicon

GEN: the generator function

CON: the constraint set

EVAL: the evaluator function

An example

The OT tableau

Example of a tableau without shading or exclamation marks
Candidates *CC Dep–V
/at-ka/ a. ☞ [atəka] ✳︎
b. [atka] ✳︎
Example of a tableau with shading and exclamation marks
Candidates *CC Dep–V
/at-ka/ a. ☞ [atəka] ✳︎
b. [atka] ✳︎!
Example of a tableau with multiple inputs
Candidates *CC Dep–V
/at-ka/ a. ☞ [atəka] ✳︎
b. [atka] ✳︎!
/at-a/ a. [atəa] ✳︎!
b. ☞ [ata]

Harmonic Bounding

Example of harmonic bounding: [atəəka] is harmonically bounded
Candidates *CC Dep–V
/at-ka/ a. [atəka] ✳︎
b. [atka] ✳︎
c. [atəəka] ✳︎✳︎

Example of collective harmonic bounding of [atkapəso]
Candidates *CC Dep–V
/at-kap-so/ a. [atkapso] ✳︎✳︎
b. [atkapəso] ✳︎ ✳︎
c. [atəkapəso] ✳︎✳︎

Practice tableau

Recap of major ideas


  1. I’ve lifted “take the best, ignore the rest” from the Take-The-Best decision-making algorithm of Gigenrezer and Goldstein (1996), which uses strictly ranked cues to make binary decisions. The decisions they’re interested in aren’t phonological, e.g. “Which of these two cities has a higher population?”, and the cues are things like “Does this city have a soccer team?” However, the mechanisms are very similar to OT. From the first lines of the paper’s abstract: “Humans and animals make inferences about the world under limited time and knowledge. In contrast, many models of rational inference treat the mind as a Laplacean Demon, equipped with unlimited time, knowledge, and computational might. Following H. Simon’s notion of satisficing, the authors have proposed a family of algorithms based on a simple psychological mechanism: one-reason decision making.”  ↩