Paul Siewert

I am firmly in theoretical linguistics to which I have a formal and philological stance – I want to see how any given human language's system of conveying meaning can be (systematically, explainably, formally, efficiently, ...) described and which problems arise in this. I think that constraint grammars are a very useful idea for this yet one with underdeveloped theoretical foundations, which I am currently working on, with a focus on phonology where this is called Optimality Theory (OT).

I am developing a version of OT which does not have the problem of computational intractibility. This I hope will make it easier to mathematically study the benefits and limitations of OT, to extend constraint grammars to other linguistic domains, and ultimately to describe languages.