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In this article we show how Optimality Theory yields a highly general Constraint Demotion principle for grammar learning. The resulting learning procedure specifically exploits the grammatical structure of Optimality Theory, independent of the content of substantive constraints defining any given grammatical module. We decompose the learning problem and present formal results for a central subproblem, deducing the constraint ranking particular to a target language, given structural descriptions of positive examples. The structure imposed on the space of possible grammars by Optimality Theory allows efficient convergence to a correct grammar. We discuss implications for learning from overt data only, as well as other learning issues. We argue that Optimality Theory promotes confluence of the demands of more effective learnability and deeper linguistic explanation.

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The research of the last four decades suggests strongly that abstract laws of significant generality underlie much of the superficial complexity of human language. Evidence in favor of this conjecture comes from two different types of facts. First, there are cross-linguistic facts. Investigation of unfamiliar and typologically diverse languages is regularly illuminated by what we already know about other

This paper discusses the description of agrammatic production focusing on the verbal inflectional morphology. Agrammatism in Hebrew is investigated through an experiment with a patient who displays a highly selective impairment: agreement inflection is completely intact, but tense inflection, use of copula, and embedded structures are severely impaired. A retrospective examination of the literature shows that our findings are corroborated by others. A selective account of the agrammatic production deficiency is proposed, according to which only a subclass of the functional syntactic categories is impaired in this syndrome. The consequence of this deficit is the pruning of the syntactic phrase marker of agrammatic patients, which impairs performance from the impaired node and higher. These findings also bear upon central issues in linguistic theories, particularly that of Pollock (1989), regarding split inflection. 1997 Academic Press

In recent work on sentence processing, lexical frequencies have been proposed as a primary mechanism for syntactic and lexical disambiguation. In this paper, we instead focus on the consequences that the structural configuration of lexical knowledge has for the time-course of parsing. We concentrate on reduced relative clauses and propose a new lexical-structural analysis for those verbs that are difficult in this construction, manner of motion verbs. The interaction between the proposed lexical structure and the competitive attachment parser (Stevenson, 1994b) explains the persistent difficulty of this construction with a manner of motion verb, even in disambiguating contexts (for example, a reduced relative in object position) or with non-ambiguous past participle verb forms. Weighted influences on the activation competition are possible with other verbs, and the model can therefore also explain data that demonstrate contextual effects on reduced relatives with simple transitives. Co...

Abstract not found

this paper states that different levels of processing can work on different pieces of an utterance at the same time. Thus, the phonological encoder can work on the early part of the clause while the syntactic encoder works on filling out what remains. As a result, once the syntactic representation for the sentence is done, its corresponding phonological representation is likely close to complete as well. 29

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This paper addresses the application of Optimality Theory (OT) in syntax from a computational point of view. The denition of a processing model for OT syntax presupposes a formalization of the notions involved. Here, the work on an OT account based on Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) can be used as a basis. In order to guarantee that the processing tasks of generation and parsing with an OT grammar are decidable and computationally tractable, certain restrictions have to be imposed on the formalism. The goal of a computational OT approach is to arrive at a sufficiently restricted formalism that is nevertheless expressive enough to capture the intuitions behind the linguistic OT accounts.