This work discusses many optimization and linguistic issues in great detail. It treats the history of a variety of languages, including English, French, Germanic, Galician/ Portuguese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish and shows that the application of Optimality Theory allows for innovative and improved analyses. It contains a complete bibliography on OT and language change. It is of interest to historical linguists, researchers into OT and linguistic theory, and phonologists and syntacticians with an interest in historical change.

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List of contributors Acknowledgements Part I Optimality Theory and Language Change: Overview and Theoretical Issues: D.Eric Holt / Remarks on Optimatility Theory and language change.- Paul Boersma / The odds of eternal optimization in Optimality Theory.- Randall Gess / On re-ranking and explanatory adequacy in a constraint-based theory of phonological change.- Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero & Richard M. Hogg / The actuation problem in Optimality Theory: Phonologization, rule inversion and rule loss.- April McMahon / When history doesn't repeat itself: Optimality Theory and implausible sound changes.- Charles Reiss / Language change without constraint reranking.- Part II Case Studies of Phonological Change: Donka Minkova & Robert Stockwell / English vowel shifts and 'optimal' diphthongs: Is there a logical link?.- Viola Miglio & Bruce Morén / Merger avoidance and lexical reconstruction: An OT model of the Great Vowel Shift.- Haike Jacobs / The emergence of quantitiy-sensitivity in Latin: Secondary stress, lambic Shortening and theorectical implications for 'mixed' stress systems.- Conxita Lleó / Some interactions between word, foot and syllable structure in the history of the Spanish language.- D.Eric Holt / The emergence of palatal sonorants and alternating diphthongs in Old Spanish.- Jaye Padgett / The emergence of contrastive palatalization in Russian.- Part III Case Studies of Syntactic Change: Benjamin Slade / How to rank constraints: Constraint conflict, grammatical competition and the rise of periphrastic do.- Larry LaFond / Historical changes in verb-second and null subjects from Old to Modern French.- Bibliography on Optimality Theory and language change / Randall Gess.- References.- Indices: Names, Languages, Constraints, Terms.