Optimality-Theoretic Syntax: A Declarative Approach

Jonas Kuhn

Jonas Kuhn advances Optimality Theory (OT) by clarifying the significant choices in the design of a formally precise OT approach to syntax. Building on OT work that uses the representation structures of Lexical Functional Grammar (OT-LFG), this book defines the notion of an OT-syntactic grammar in a declarative, non-derivational way.

Along with the standard OT architecture, which is based on a generation metaphor, Kuhn also formalizes parsing-based OT and goes on to discuss possible combinations of these two architectures. This is followed by an examination of assumptions under which the computational tasks of generation and parsing are decidable for an OT-syntactic grammar.

Jonas Kuhn is an assistant professor of computational linguistics in the linguistics department of The University of Texas at Austin.

5/15/2003

ISBN (Paperback): 1575864266

ISBN (Cloth): 1575864258