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<Paper uid="P02-1008">
  <Title>Comprehension and Compilation in Optimality Theory</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Previous Work on Comprehension
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Work focusing on OT comprehension--or even mentioning it--has been surprisingly sparse. While the recent constructions mentioned inx1 can easily be applied to the comprehension problem, as we will explain, they were motivated primarily by a desire to pare back OT's generative power to that of previous rewrite-rule formalisms (Johnson, 1972).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Fosler (1996) noted the existence of the OT comprehension task and speculated that it might succumb to heuristic search. Smolensky (1996) proposed to solve it by optimizing the underlying form,</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Hale and Reiss (1998) pointed out in response that any comprehension-by-optimization strategy would have to arrange for multiple optima: after all, phonological comprehension is a one-to-many mapping (since phonological production is many-to-one).1 The correctness of Smolensky's proposal (i.e., whether it really computes COMPREHEND) depends on the particular harmony measure. It can be made to work, multiple optima and all, if the harmony measure is constructed with both production and comprehension in mind. Indeed, for any phonology, it is trivial to design a harmony measure that both production and comprehension optimize. (Just define the harmony of (x;z) to be 1 or 0 according to whether the mapping x7!z is in the language!) But we are really only interested in harmony measures that are defined by OT-style grammars (rankings of &amp;quot;simple&amp;quot; constraints). In this case Smolensky's proposal can be unworkable. In particular,x4 will show that a finite-state production grammar in classical OT need not be invertible by any finite-state comprehension grammar.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> 1Hale &amp; Reiss's criticism may be specific to phonology and syntax. For some phenomena in semantics, pragmatics, and even morphology, Blutner (1999) argues for a one-to-one form-meaning mapping in which marked forms express marked meanings. He deliberately uses bidirectional optimization to rule out many-to-one cases: roughly speaking, an (x;z) pair is grammatical for him only ifz is optimal givenxand vice-versa.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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