THE ARCHITECTURE AND CONSTRUCTION OF AN OPTIMAL GRAMMAR

Abstract

The Optimality Theory is a relatively new theory of language that was originally proposed by the linguists Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky (1993/2002), and was later expanded by Alan Prince and John McCarthy (see, e.g., McCarthy, 2004). It is a major assumption of the theory that ‘there are no fixed bounds on language’ (see Aitchison, 2003, p. 32) .Although much of the interest in optimality theory has been associated with its use in phonology, the area to which optimality theory was first applied, the theory is also applicable to other subfields of linguistics, e.g. syntax and semantics.

Keywords

Outputs, inputs, designs