Optimality-theoretic syntax : a declarative approach / Jonas Kuhn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kuhn, Jonas, 1971-

Series:

Studies in constraint-based lexicalism

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax.

Grammar, Comparative and general.

Optimality theory (Linguistics).

Lexical-functional grammar.

Physical Description:

xiii, 238 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Study of Language and Information, [2003]

Summary:

With this book, Jonas Kuhn greatly 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), Kuhn 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.

Contents:

1. Introduction ; 1.2 The foundations of optimality theory

2.1 Conflicting violable constraints ; 2.2 Factorial typology and the grounding of constraints ; 2.3 Summary

3 some observations about optimality-theoretic syntax

3.1 On the motivation of syntactic OT constraints ; 3.2 Faithfulness violations in phonology and syntax ; 3.3 Learning and the character of the input ; 3.4 Summary

4. The formalization of OT syntax in the LFG framework ; 4.1 Background on the lexical-functional grammar (LFG) formalism ; 4.2 Optimality-theoretic LFG: the overall architecture ; 4.3 Candidate generation and the inviolable principles ; 4.4 The violable constraints: markedness constraints ; 4.5 Faithfulness constraints ; 4.6 Summary

5. The direction of optimization ; 5.1 Varying the input to optimization ; 5.2 The character of comprehension-based optimization ; 5.3 Bidirectional optimization ; 5.4 Summary

6. Computational OT syntax ; 6.1 Processing issues for OT-LFG ; 6.2. Decidability of OT-LFG generation ; 6.3 Recognition and parsing for OT-LFG ; 6.4 Summary

7. Conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-227) and indexes.

ISBN:

1575864258

1575864266

OCLC:

52272687