Optimality and Wh-Extraction

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to start addressing the issues outlined above from the perspective of Optimality Theory (OT, Prince and Smolensky, 1993) and test the hypothesis that different patterns of extractability across languages result from different rankings of universal constraints realizing a few simple principles. The scope of this paper does not permit us to address all these issues (which are the topic of our on-going research); here we can only set up the basic framework and explore a few of its consequences. In particular we limit ourselves here to languages which observe movement constraints, whether they make use of wh-fronting (English, Bulgarian) or in-situ-wh (Chinese). The framework we develop is a version of GB which incorporates the two fundamental constructs of OT, soft constraints and ranking of soft constraints. In content, some of our constraints are reminiscent of similar constraints in the GB literature; they are, however, formally quite different because of their intrinsic violability and because of the way they interact: they can be violated in well-formed structures, and the force of a given constraint is greaterin some languages than in others.

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