So I was looking up veridical on Yahoo’s dictionary today and was surprised to see its entry included information regarding syllabication. I thought, funny that a dictionary would misspell a word. For a quick frequency test, I typed “syllabication” into Google to see how many hits there’d be: 157,000, whereas “syllabification” got a mere 11,400. Not a favourable exchange rate. Although many of those 157,000 sites could be dictionary entries.

“Veridical”, incidentally, hits 18,000 sites, while “verdical” is limited to 321.

Anyway the idea was for me to jump back into the fray with the recent posts in the overgeneration and attestation vein, and I’m happy to see Charles Reiss adding to it.

“My take on the moral of the story is that the overgeneration argument should be put to bed” — I guess I’d rather elaborate on that. Not that I think overgeneration doesn’t matter, but as Eric points out (as I read it), when OT and rule-ordering are held to the same standard (in terms of strict versus partial ordering), the respective sizes of the sets of describable languages seem to be comparable (holding number of rules and number of constraints constant).

Charles adds:

Obviously this issue is not tied to OT vs. derivations. If the factorial typology of a proposed constraint set yields some bizarre grammars, I am not willing to invoke that as an argument against OT.

This is a very fair thing to say, and obvious to me too, and presumably Eric. I hope we’re not alone!

Incidentally the LSA talk I mentioned was in Atlanta. I tried looking through my handouts to see if I had it (and perhaps had written my question down) and couldn’t find it. So I checked the program, rediscovering the following title: Sungwon Koo (Concordia U) & Charles Reiss (Concordia U): The Stressmatica stress generator: Constrained without constraints. It may have been a powerpoint presentation. I can’t recall the details either, but just to be clear, I didn’t mean to let on in my post that I objected.

Something else that occurred to me while reading Eric’s latest:

Crucial nonordering of rules has probably also been explicitly discussed

Out of curiosity, would disjunctive rule-ordering be an example of non-ordering?