Input and GEN: The Candidate Set
Optimality theory supposes that there are no language-specific restrictions on the input. This is called richness of the base. Every grammar can handle every possible input. For example, a language without complex clusters must be able to deal with an input such as /flask/. Languages without complex clusters differ on how they will resolve this problem; some will epenthesize (e.g., or if all codas are banned) and some will delete (e.g., ). Given any input, GEN generates an infinite number of candidates, or possible realizations of that input. A language's grammar (its ranking of constraints) determines which of the infinite candidates will be assessed as optimal by EVAL.
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