This paper provides a comprehensive Optimality Theoretic formalization of a Finnish language game. In opposition to earlier rule-based studies, the present analysis motivates the sometimes arbitrary-looking patterns of the game and brings together various phenomena under a unified set of universal constraints. The paper also demonstrates the close relationship between language games and natural languages by showing how the patterns of the game are analysable with the help of constraints of ordinary languages, or constraints that deviate only minimally from the original ones. The analysis of the game offers valuable external evidence for the phonology of Finnish with respect to the internal structure of long segments, vowel harmony, syllable markedness and the integrity of diphthongs.

This paper presents a novel analysis of aspiration, preaspiration, and the related phenomena of sonorant devoicing and spirantization in an Optimality Theoretic framework. Central to the analysis are two constraints: one requires that the feature [spread glottis] be shared by adjacent consonants, and another prohibits moraic [spread glottis] stops. Aspirated stops are singleton stops that are specified as [spread glottis]. Unaspirated stops either have no [spread glottis] feature or share a [spread glottis] feature with another consonant. There is no movement of aspiration or the [spread glottis] feature from one segment to another as in earlier analyses. This account is fully in accord with phonetic descriptions and is of theoretical interest because it supports the fission analysis of preaspiration and is consistent with the assumption that geminates are moraic consonants.

The paper offers an account of coordination within the framework of Optimality Theory, which makes use of violable and ranked constraints. Coordination is explained with the help of nine constraints, seven of which are needed in the theory independently of coordination, while the remaining two are coordination-specific constraints. Related phenomena of Unbalanced Coordination and Extraordinary Balanced Coordination are also discussed and differences among Norwegian, English and Hungarian are explained by the difference in the relative ranking of the four relevant constraints.

This article argues that the difference between English and Norwegian with respect to the presence of a complementizer in embedded subject questions is attributable to a larger difference between the two languages, namely that Norwegian is a verb second language while English is not. Verb second forces subject wh- phrases to move to the specifier of a higher projection in Norwegian. The movement creates the need for a complementizer. In English, there is no such pressure for subject wh- phrases to move. Therefore there is no need for a complementizer. The so called anti-*that- trace effects in Norwegian and their lack in English supports the use of ranked and violable constraints in an Optimality-Theoretic system.

The presentational focus construction in Norwegian can have an agent in object position, as in Det arbeidet en mann i skogen ‘It worked a man in the-woods”. This creates problems for linking theory, in which a robust generalization says that agents are not realized as objects. Optimality Theory makes possible a new approach to this classical problem in Scandinavian generative grammar. The constraint that agents are not realized as objects must compete with other constraints. In Norwegian, it is ranked below a requirement that a presentational focus must be realized in object position. The Norwegian situation is compared to languages with different constraint rankings.