This volume draws together papers that argue for a renewed focus on the role of hard constraints on phonological representations as well as the processes that operate on them. These are issues that have been sidelined since the shift in emphasis in phonological research to functionally grounded output-oriented constraints. Taking Optimality Theory as their starting point, the articles attack the question to what degree the Generator function Gen should be given freedom of analysis on three fronts.

This study shows that Scandinavian object shift and so-called A-scrambling in the continental Germanic languages are the same, and aims at providing an account of the variation that we find with respect to this phenomenon by combining certain aspects of the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory. More specifically, it is claimed that representations created by a simplified version of the computational system of human language CHL are evaluated in an optimality theoretic fashion by taking recourse to a very small set of output constraints.

In the 1980s generative grammar recognized that functional material is able to project syntactic structure in conformity with the X-bar-format. This insight soon led to a considerable increase in the inventory of functional projections. The basic idea behind this line of theorizing, which goes by the name of cartography, is that sentence structure can be represented as a template of linearly ordered positions, each with their own syntactic and semantic import.

In recent years, however, a number of problems have been raised for this approach. For example, certain combinations of...