OT-Help User Manual

OT-Help (Becker, Pater & Potts 2007) is a free open-source Java-based program that aids research in Optimality Theory (OT, Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004) and its cousin, Harmonic Grammar (HG, Smolensky and Legendre 2006). OT-Help will find a constraint ranking or weighting consistent with the data provided by the user, if one exists. The solution can be displayed either in a standard tableau format, or as a comparative tableau (Prince 2002a). OT-Help will also find the set of possible languages in both OT and HG, given the user's set of constraints. Typology can also be explored interactively by selecting different sets of optima. OT-Help is available at http://web.linguist.umass.edu/~OTHelp/The definitive version of this paper is published in University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 36: Papers in theoretical and computational phonology (2007) and is available at http://glsa.hypermart.net/cgi-bin/list.cgi?ALL%UMOP36%1%YBecker, Michael and Joe Pater. "OT-Help user guide" In Michael Becker (ed.), University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 36: Papers in Theoretical and Computational Phonology (pp 1-12). Amherst, MA : GLSA Publications, 200