FOR 5175:  Cyclic Optimization

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439622645

Cyclic structure building (as in Chomsky’s Minimalist Program) and optimization (as in Optimality Theory) are two central research areas of grammatical theory, but only a fraction of the research in both fields addresses their interaction. The general intuition behind cyclic models of grammars is that the same operations (or types of operations) apply iteratively in increasingly bigger morphosyntactic domains. A simple version of this idea is interleaving syntactic or morphological structure-building operations with interpretive or restructuring operations. Thus, in Chomsky’s Minimalist Syntax, the basic operation Merge is structure-building in creating hierarchical syntactic representations (‘trees’) whereas the alternating operation Agree just modifies the featural content of syntactic units, or, under a slightly different perspective, adds information for morphological interpretation. Similarly in Lexical Phonology, interpretive phonological rules are cyclically interleaved with morphological structure building. By optimization, we understand a grammatical procedure which chooses among different potential alternatives and blocks suboptimal alternatives, based on a structured set of criteria. A classical case is the Elsewhere Condition which captures, for example, the fact that more specific morphological realizations block more general ones, such as the blocking of the potential English plural forms *ox-es by the listed form ox-en. Optimization in the broad sense envisaged here underlies not only Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar, but also psycholinguistic race models, analogy-based models, and last-resort and repair operations in derivational approaches to syntax. The goal of the research unit proposed here is to explore the hypothesis that combining cyclicity and optimization achieves an added level of explanation not available to either alone: Cyclicity can substantially restrict the search space of optimization processes and explain why optimization is often surface-opaque, while optimization yields a principled account for the timing, size, and variability of cycles, as shown by encouraging results in Stratal Optimality Theory and Harmonic Serialism Based on these results, we want to extend the empirical coverage of models where cyclicity and optimization crucially interact to a comprehensive range of grammatical phenomena, and develop their full theoretical potential. Thus the single sub-projects in the research unit investigate the interactions between all basic grammatical modules (morphology, syntax, semantics, and phonology), and evaluate and compare systematically different versions of Cyclic Optimization on the same and related types of empirical data. In addition, a complementary computational sub-project investigates abstract, formal properties of Cyclic Optimization approaches across grammatical areas.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Computational Aspects of Cyclic Optimization (Applicant Kobele, Gregory M. )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Trommer, Jochen )
• Layers of morphosyntactic number in Eastern Sudanic (Applicant Trommer, Jochen )
• Morphological Strata of Tone (Applicants Trommer, Jochen ;  Zimmermann, Eva )
• Optimal matches between clause-embedding predicates and their clausal complements (Applicant Stiebels, Barbara )
• Prosodically determined dislocation of coordinators (Applicant Weisser, Philipp )
• Prospects of Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism (Applicant Müller, Gereon )
• Semantic and phonological correlates of affix order (Applicants Stiebels, Barbara ;  Trommer, Jochen )
• Syntactic repairs and cyclic optimization (Applicant Heck, Fabian )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Jochen Trommer