Phonological Change in Optimality Theory

doi:10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/01876-9

Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition)

2006, Pages 497-505

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The relationship between Optimality Theory (OT) and historical phonology works both ways: OT provides new angles on long-standing diachronic questions, whilst historical data and models of change bear directly on the assessment of OT. Phonological change raises two main questions for OT. First, is markedness a mere epiphenomenon of recurrent processes of sound change, or does markedness on the contrary constrain both sound change and analogy? Second, what optimality-theoretic resources best explain analogical change: input optimization, innate biases in the ranking of output-output correspondence constraints, both, or neither?

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From 1999 to 2005, Dr Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero held a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the British Academy at the University of Manchester, followed by a Lectureship in Linguistics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Currently he is Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on Optimality Theory and Lexical Phonology, with particular attention to their diachronic applications and to problems in the morphology-phonology and phonology-phonetics interfaces. He has contributed articles for the journals English Language and Linguistics and Lingua, as well as chapters in the volumes Optimality Theory and language change (Kluwer, 2003), The handbook of English linguistics (Blackwell, 2005), and The Cambridge handbook of phonology (Cambridge University Press, 2005). His monograph Stratal Optimality Theory will shortly be published by Oxford University Press.

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