We develop an extensible description logic for stating the content of optimalitytheoretic constraints in phonology, and specify a class of structures for interpreting it. The aim is a transparent formalisation of OT. We show how to state a wide range of constraints, including markedness, input–output faithfulness and base–reduplicant faithfulness. However, output–output correspondence and ‘intercandidate’ sympathy are revealed to be problematic: it is unclear that any reasonable class of structures can reconstruct their proponents’ intentions. But our contribution is positive. Proponents of both output–output correspondence and sympathy have offered alternatives that fit into the general OT picture. We show how to state these in a reasonable extension of our formalism. The problematic constraint types were developed to deal with opaque phenomena. We hope to shed new light on the debate about how to handle opacity, by subjecting some common responses to it within OT to critical investigation.

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One of the major tasks that infants are facing in learning their native language is to learn to extract words from the speech stream. Since most of the word boundaries in speech are not signaled by silences or other acoustic cues, the infant has to rely on different strategies to find these boundaries. One such strategy is the use of a statistical learning mechanism. Saffran et al. (1996) showed that learners use transitional probabilities to detect word boundaries. Several studies have also shown that phonotactics provide a useful cue for speech segmentation (Brent and Cartwright, 1996; McQueen, 1998). Moreover, Jusczyk et al. (1993) showed that 9-month-old infants are able to distinguish between native and nonnative phonotactics, providing evidence that at least some knowledge of phonotactics is acquired before infants have acquired an adult-sized lexicon. Models of phonotactic learning have so far assumed that phonotactic constraints are innate (Tesar and Smolensky, 2000; Prince and Tesar, 2004) or induced from an adult-sized lexicon (Hayes and Wilson, 2007). The use of phonotactics in a pre-lexical stage, however, suggests that phonotactic constraints have to be learnable from continuous speech input. Another important issue is the nature of phonotactic knowledge. Previous studies

date: 2011