Is the Best Good Enough?: Optimality and Competition in Syntax (review)

This proceedings of a workshop held at MIT in 1995 consists of sixteen papers, a brief acknowledgment and a short introduction by the editors (1–14), and an even shorter index. Eight papers deal with syntax and optimality theory (OT): ‘WHOT?’ by Peter Ackema and Ad Neeleman (15–33);¹ ‘Optimality and inversion in Spanish’ by Eric Baković (35–58); ‘Morphology competes with syntax: Explaining typological variation in weak crossover effects’ by Joan Bresnan (59–92); ‘Anaphora and soft constraints’ by Luigi Burzio (93–113); ‘Optimal subjects and subject universals’ by Jane Grimshaw and Vieri Samek-Lodovici (193–219); ‘When is less more? Faithfulness and minimal links in wh-chains’ by Géraldine Legendre, Paul Smolensky, and ColinWilson (249–89); ‘On the nature of inputs and outputs: A case study of negation’ by Mark Newson (315–36); and ‘Some optimality principles of sentence pronunciation’ by David Pesetsky (337–83). Four papers deal with the principle of economy in the minimalist program (MP): ‘Some observations on economy in generative grammar’ by Noam Chomsky (115–27); ‘Locality in variable binding’ by Danny Fox, (129–55); ‘Reference set, minimal link condition, and parameterization’ by Masanori Nakamura (291–313); and ‘Constraints on local economy’ by Geoffrey Poole (385–98). The remaining four papers deal with various topics other than syntax: ‘Optimality theory and human sentence processing’ by Edward Gibson and Edward Broihier (157–91); ‘Semantic and pragmatic context-dependence: The case of reciprocals’ by Yookyung Kim and Stanley Peters (221–47); ‘The logical problem of language acquisition in optimality theory’ by Douglas Pulleyblank and William J. Turkel (399–420); and ‘Error-driven learning in optimality theory via the efficient computation of optimal forms’ by Bruce B. Tesar (421–35).

In their introduction, the editors make a heroic effort to show how all these papers are related, by contrasting two views concerning explanation in linguistics: (1) a ‘standard scenario’ in which the status of a linguistic ‘object’ is determined by how independent principles analyze it and it alone, and (2) an ‘optimality scenario’ in which the status of an object is determined by how interacting principles analyze it in relation to other objects. They note that linguistic explanation has traditionally favored the standard scenario (whence the editors’ choice of labels). Next, they review some occasions in which the optimality scenario has been used, beginning with Pāṇini’s principle that the application of a rule of grammar depends on the failure of a more specific rule to be applied. They show that explanations within the optimality scenario require at minimum the determination of a ‘reference set’ of competing objects and a ‘metric’ for selecting one or more members of the reference set. This framework is general enough to cover all of the papers in this volume,² even Kim and Peters’s, for which the reference set consists of the possible meanings of the reciprocal anaphor, and the metric yields the strongest meaning consistent with world knowledge and contextual assumptions. As this example shows, the optimality scenario can be used for explanations in the domain of linguistic performance as well as of competence.

The editors’ historical survey omits perhaps the most striking recent use of an optimality scenario prior to the advent of the minimalist program (MP) and of optimality theory (OT), namely the use of ‘transderivational constraints’ within generative semantics (Lakoff 1973, Hankamer 1973).³ The standard critical response to the use of devices like transderivational constraints (as in Langendoen 1975; see also Harris 1993:181), that they needlessly increase the descriptive power of the theory of grammar, is easily countered...