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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Certain questions about OT often arise on initial exposure to the theory. Here, I have compiled a list of these frequently asked questions (FAQs). Each question receives a short answer with cross-references to more extensive discussion in the text. Those who are inclined to read desultorily may also find the FAQs useful as a nonlinear guide to the text.
How is it possible for a linguistic expression to be absolutely ill formed in an optimizing theory that always manages to find an output?
The source of absolute ill-formedness is absolute neutralization. If EVAL maps both /A/ and /B/ onto [A], and if EVAL maps nothing else to [B], then [B] is absolutely ill-formed. See §3.1.2.3, §3.4 ¶3, and §4.1.2.
Are the candidates the same in all languages?
Candidate forms may very well be the same in all languages, but the relationship of an individual candidate form to its input (such as a correspondence relation) differs depending on the input. See §1.1.3.
If the candidate set is infinite, how is EVAL ever able to find the most harmonic candidate?
Well-definition of a function and efficient computation of that function are not the same thing (see §1.1.3), and there are both computational and formal techniques for bringing the infinity of candidates under control (see §4.3).
OT analyses sometimes seem much more complicated than rule-based accounts of the same phenomena (cf. §3.1.4.1). It can take many constraints to characterize a process that can be expressed with a single rule (see (1) in §3.1.1).
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