Savannah Needs a Crash Course in Optimality Theory

Like a kid waiting for Santa, I stood outside my apartment gate this afternoon, waiting for the book that I ordered with my birthday gift card from Kelly: Tone by Moira Yip. Lately I have been passionate about understanding the classification and clustering of tone languages. Some estimates speculate that seventy percent of the world’s languages feature tone. My impression in this rudimentary research is that tone is a spectrum, and these languages tend to clump together in Southeast Asia and throughout Africa and parts of South America.

So back to the book. I took it from the delivery man and scuttled upstairs. The book was so beautiful coming out of its white package. I beheld it. I opened it to see its table of contents and was surprised that Yip has framed her book in Optimality Theory (OT). Oh my.

Isn’t OT the thing with the pointing fingers? said Savannah.

My first brush with OT came when I was a tutor at UNM and my fellow tutor Keiko and I were talking about a linguistics meme. Keiko kindly explained the joke to me. I still giggle when I think back on the meme. My understanding, though still limited, is that OT is within the framework of generative grammar and we don’t practice generative grammar in this house.

Nonetheless, I think, even if I am more interested in usage-based models of language, I think it is worthwhile to learn the facts of life, which in linguistics means that OT and generative grammar are commonly adhered to research traditions. I would like to understand them so that I can choose a path forward in research that is cohesive and well-studied. I think we know what this means: Chomsky is next. Dun, dun, dun.

As an undergraduate, phonology was my least favorite subject within linguistics. I salivated over syntax, but phonology was cumbersome, elusive, taunting. I had done decently enough in phonetics and enjoyed my class because we had a great professor. And I had another great professor in phonology, but even so the subject and I adopted a cool, wary standoff. While at work with another linguistics student, Laura, she told me knowingly that a love of phonology would be inevitable for me because that is part of being a linguist. I shrugged at the time, but she was right. Now, even though features still exasperate me, I love studying tone. I love studying phonological typology.

Sometimes, I don’t know how I can be a real linguist if I get a translation wrong on my Spanish Duolingo. A real linguist would understand Spanish’s grammatical moods and when to use each. Like, duh. And here I sit with Tone and Yip says that we’ll be using OT and I’m feeling a bit like a fraud. I need to know more than the fact that it has some pointing fingers that provide excellent fodder for clever linguistics memes.

I have so many textbooks, all of which will be spotlighted in the next blog post. As I meander my way through Mental Spaces, I feel like I have a stronger grasp of the topic than I did ten years ago. Maybe it is maturity. Maybe Little Miss Intellectually Promiscuous just had to stew with this for some time. Either way, I am ready to define and understand OT, generative grammar, and how it contrasts with what I certainly believe about language. The goal of any scientist is to be proven wrong, and even though I don’t share Chomsky’s perspective, it will be fun to see things from the other side. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

Academia is a funny thing. How so many ideas propagate and are passed down from Virgil to Dante, how some ideas are favored by some minds and others stubbornly reject them. I’ve heard of academia as something of a tree with branches. I want very much to work in this field someday; I may as well clamber up some of the branches.

Let’s start with a Google search: What is Optimality Theory? When do I get to use the pointing fingers? When I select the optimal candidate, the form that satisfies the proposed constraints, do I get to put the little doodle on the page?

Whether I end up putting a lot of stock in OT or not, it is the flavor of Tone that I am excited to contemplate. I’m still in Usage-Based Models of Language and love every minute of it. I stick my little sticky notes and highlight important concepts. I start classes in August. One way of looking at that is that I only have two months to prepare, and I need all the refreshers on Cognitive Grammar that I can get. Perhaps it will be fun to read more about OT, to see the other side of the veil.

I also recently acquired Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage for my upcoming typology class. I’ll be ingesting some more theories, namely Motivation Theory. At some point, I’ll be able to expound upon that, too, and say, “Well, versus OT….” I love this. I love each approach to human cognition lovingly thought up by researchers who want to know what it is to be a human, what it means to own a mind.

I can’t wait to someday introduce myself to strangers and Uber drivers as a linguist. What do you do for a living? Well, I know what OT is, so obviously I am a linguist. Every book pushes me a bit closer to that goal. Someday, someday.