Abstract
Abstract In comparing sound patterns across languages, a phonologist develops a sense of what patterns are ‘natural’, in that they occur frequently in the world’s languages, and what patterns are ‘unnatural’, in that they are unlikely to occur. In many cases, we would agree that what distinguishes a natural pattern from an unnatural one is that the former is phonetically natural, in that it corresponds to a phonetic pattern. In this chapter I will argue that Optimality Theory (OT: Prince and Smolensky 1993) is better able than traditional derivational models to express the correspondence between phonetically natural phonological patterns and their phonetic counterparts. This makes OT better suited than derivational models to distinguish natural phonological patterns from unnatural ones.
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