ABSTRACT
Prince and Smolensky (1993) proposed that Universal Grammar could be taken to be a set of violable constraints and their interactions. As originally conceived, the set of constraints is universal, and languages differ only in the particular ranking of these constraints. The architecture of this system is schematized in (1). An input string is submitted to GEN, which modifies the string in any number of ways to produce a set of possible output candidates. This candidate set is evaluated by the language particular constraint ranking to yield the most harmonic candidate. The most harmonic candidate with respect to the constraint ranking is optimal and surfaces as the output. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315023779/7cf3fc21-15e8-40ff-9a12-9bdd3c3783f6/content/pg21_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
