Despite their apparently divergent accounts of higher cognition, cognitive theories based on neural computation & those employing symbolic computation can strengthen one another. This work set develops a cognitive architecture based in neural computation, but supports formally explicit higher-level symbolic descriptions.

This book investigates the morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of language, and the interactions between them, from the perspective of Optimality Theory. It integrates optimization processes into the formal and functional study of grammar, interpreting optimization as the result of conflicting, violable ranked constraints.
Unlike previous work on the topic, this book also takes into account the question of directionality of grammar. A model of grammar in which optimization processes interact bidirectionally allows both language generation-the process of selecting the...