Defining Optimality Theoretic Meta Theory in a Formal Framework

The present research is aimed to provide a general introduction to Optimality Theoretic (OT) framework, and reviews the main assumptions of OT, together with its evaluation of linguistic structures by the use of so-called Tableaus. In general the paper introduces OT as a Meta theory which focuses on the comparison of competing candidate analyses that makes it compatible with linguistic representations from various frameworks.The data is then followed by an illustrative example of an analysis in OT syntax, taken from Grimshaw’s (1997) account of inversion in English, which is set in the style of Governmentand-Binding Theory (GB).