ABSTRACT
In optimality theory (OT) this trend reached its inevitable conclusion, with the total abandonment of rules in favor of a fully constraint-based phonology. Much of the initial appeal of OT was its potential applicability to other areas of linguistic analysis, and indeed research has been conducted in optimality theoretic syntax and semantics. Optimality theory was introduced in Prince and Smolensky and developed in McCarthy and Prince. In OT, constraints are not peripheral or secondary to rules, but are the sole tenant of the theory. Just as OT has become the dominant theory of mainstream linguistics, so too has the literature concerning clinical phonology become inundated with applications of OT to clinical data. To sanction the invention of constraints to handle specific phenomena is to seriously reduce the strength of the theory. The richness of the base and universality of the input are discussed in Smolensky, and the theory was given a full application to language acquisition in Tesar and Smolensky.
