Optimality Theoretic Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics From Uni- to Bidirectional Optimization

Geraldine Legendre is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. She co-developed, with Paul Smolensky, the soft constraint-based precursor to Optimality Theory and has played a major role in the development of OT in syntax since the early 1990s, focussing particularly on comparative studies of phenomena in syntax and at the syntax-semantics interface and on the modelling of early child syntax and code-switching. She is co-author of The Harmonic Mind (with Paul Smolensky; MIT Press, 2006) and co-editor of Optimality-Theoretic Syntax (with Jane Grimshaw and Sten Vikner; MIT Press, 2001).

Michael T. Putnam is Associate Professor of German and Linguistics at Penn State University. His work focuses on gaining a better understanding of the cognitive architecture underlying the language faculty at the intersection of culture, grammar, and performance biases, and he has published widely on comparative Germanic linguistics, the morphosyntax-semantics interface, and bilingualism. He is the author of The Structural Design of Language (with Thomas S. Stroik; CUP, 2013) and editor of Studies in German-Language Islands (Benjamins, 2011).

Henriette de Swart is Professor of French Linguistics and Semantics at Utrecht University. Her research is concerned with cross-linguistic variation at the syntax-semantics-pragmatic interface, looking specifically at tense and aspect, negation, indefinites, genericity, and bare nominals. Her publications include Introduction to Natural Language Semantics (University of Chicago Press, 1998), The Semantics of Incorporation (with Donka Farkas; CSLI, 2003), and Conflicts in Interpretation (with Petra Hendriks, Helen de Hoop, and Irene Kramer; Equinox, 2010).

Erin Zaroukian is a postdoctoral fellow in the Human Research and Engineering Directorate of the US Army Research Laboratory, where her primary research is in human-computer collaboration. Her PhD work focused on formal semantics of approximation and hedging, which she continued, with an experimental focus, as a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (Ecole Normale Superieure, PSL Research University, CNRS).

1. Introduction, Geraldine Legendre, Michael T. Putnam, Henriette de Swart, and Erin Zaroukian
PART I: Issues in Optimality-Theoretic Syntax
2. Intersecting constraints: Why certain constraint-types overlap while others don't, Marc van Oostendorp, Michael T. Putnam, and Laura Catharine Smith
3. Optimal constructions, Ralf Vogel
4. On accelerating and decelerating movement: From Minimalist preference principles to harmonic serialism, Fabian Heck and Gereon Muller
5. Two types of portmanteau agreement: Syntactic and morphological, Ellen Woolford
6. Feature inheritance versus extended projections, Hans Broekhuis
7. Multiple grammars, dominance, and optimization, Joshua Bousquette, Michael T. Putnam, Joseph Salmons, Benjamin Frey, and Daniel Nutzel
PART II: Issues in Optimality-Theoretic Semantics and Pragmatics
8. On the origin of constraints, Sander Lestrade, Geertje van Bergen, and Peter de Swart
9. Optimality Theory and lexical interpretation and selection, Lotte Hogeweg
10. On the optimal interpretation of yes and no in Dutch, Jet Hoek and Helen de Hoop
11. Telicity features of bare nominals, Henriette de Swart
12. Blocking effects at the lexicon/semantics interface and bidirectional optimization in French, Geraldine Legendre, Paul Smolensky, and Jennifer Culbertson
13. Unfaithful conduct: A competence-based explanation of asymmetries between production and comprehension, Petra Hendriks
References
Index