Derivations and Evaluations

Abstract

This chapter will motivate why it is useful to consider the topic of derivations and fi ltering in more detail. We will argue against the popular belief that the minimalist program and optimality theory are incompatible theories in that the former places the explanatory burden on the generative device (the computational system C HL ) whereas the latter places it on the fi ltering device (the OT evaluator). Although this belief may be correct in as far as it describes existing tendencies, we will argue that minimalist and optimality theoretic approaches normally adopt more or less the same global architecture of grammar: both assume that a generator defi nes a set S of potentially well-formed expressions that can be generated on the basis of a given input and that there is an evaluator that selects the expressions from S that are actually grammatical in a given language L. For this reason, we believe that it has a high priority to investigate the role of the two components in more detail in the hope that this will provide a better understanding of the differences and similarities between the two approaches. We will conclude this introduction with a brief review of the studies collected in this book.

Resolving conflicts with violable constraints: On the cross-modular parallelism of repairs

“…The connection between Last Resort and Optimality Theory has also been discussed at various points in the literature (e.g. Samek-Lodovici 2006;Broekhuis & Klooster 2007;Broekhuis 2008Broekhuis , 2013Broekhuis & Woolford 2013;Grimshaw 2013;Salzmann 2013). The "condition on representations" in (10) clearly corresponds to markedness constraints in OT, i.e.…”

Syntactic Microvariation

“…Microvariation then belongs to the periphery and there, other kinds of principles/rules operate, see Uriagereka (2007) who models the various levels according to the Chomsky‐hierarchy: the periphery is described with a context‐sensitive grammar whereas the merge operation for example is taken to correspond to a finite state grammar. Others suggest to model the variation in the periphery via (stochastic) Optimality theory put on top of a Minimalist structure generating grammar, see Broekhuis (2008), Seiler (2004), Salzmann (2009); see for the general approach to stochastic OT, Bresnan and Deo (2001), applied to variational data.…”

Towards a Typology of Locative Inversion – Bantu, Perhaps Chinese and English – But Beyond?

“…Consequently, English LI has been analyzed as involving a reversal of grammatical functions (Bresnan 1994; Collins 1997). On one particularly influential account (Broekhuis 2008; Den Dikken 2006; Hoekstra and Mulder 1990), LI is subsumed under predicate inversion as in:…”