Optimality Theory and Pragmatics

'This collection clearly demonstrates that Optimality Theory finds fruitful applications in the domain of pragmatics. The papers show how to overcome the traditional gap between linguistic meaning and utterance meaning. Conceptions like relevance, conversational implicature, pragmatic anomaly, grammaticalization, recoverability, and constructional iconicity appear in a new light'. - Manfred Krifka, Professor in General Linguistics, Insititute for German Speech and Linguistics, Humboldt University, Germany

'Though the idea of optimization was present in the pragmatic enterprise from the very beginning, we had to wait for this collection in order to see how to integrate pragmatics into Optimality Theory.' - Professor Paul Smolensky, Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University