Open AccessHOW HAS OPTIMALITY THEORY ACHIEVED THE GOALS OF LINGUISTIC THEORY
Author(s) -
Israa .B Abdurrahman
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
al-ādāb
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2706-9931
pISSN - 1994-473X
DOI - 10.31973/aj.v0i111.1530
Subject(s) - optimality theory , constraint (computer aided design) , hierarchy , ranking (information retrieval) , set (abstract data type) , mathematics , property (philosophy) , mathematical economics , linguistics , computer science , economics , artificial intelligence , epistemology , philosophy , geometry , market economy , phonology , programming language
Optimality Theory (OT) is a grammatical framework of recent origin presented by Prince and Smolensky in 1993. The central idea of Optimality Theory is that surface forms of language reflect resolutions of conflicts between competing constraints. A surface form is ‘optimal’ in the sense that it incurs the least serious violations of a set of violable constraints, ranked in a language-specific hierarchy. Constraints are universal and languages differ in the ranking of constraints, giving priorities to some constraints over others. Such rankings are based on ‘strict’ domination: if one constraint outranks another, the higher-ranked constraint has priority, regardless of violations of the lower-ranked one. However, such violation must be minimal, which predicts the economy property of grammatical processes. This paper tries to seek the clues to prove that optimality theory achieves the goals of linguistic theory successfully