 Phonological Comprehension And The Compilation Of Optimality Theory 


This paper ties up some loose ends in finite-state Optimality Theory. First, it discusses how to perform comprehension under Optimality Theory grammars consisting of finite-state constraints. Comprehension has not been much studied in OT; we show that unlike production, it does not always yield a regular set, making finite-state methods inapplicable. However, after giving a suitably flexible presentation of OT, we show carefully how to treat comprehension under recent variants of OTin which grammars can be compiled into finite-state transducers. We then unify these variants, showing that compilation is possible if all components of the grammar are regular relations, including the harmony ordering on scored candidates. 

