This volume explores how the effectiveness of communication is shaped by aspects of semantics and pragmatics such as compositionality, the role of the speaker and hearer, and the acquisition of meaning. Optimal Communication surveys recent research in the fields of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and draws from optimality theory to argue that optimal meanings result from a compromise between competing constraints. Optimal Communication will be an invaluable resource for students in cognitive science, linguistics, and natural language semantics.

With this book, Jonas Kuhn greatly advances Optimality Theory (OT) by clarifying the significant choices in the design of a formally precise OT approach to syntax. Building on OT work that uses the representation structures of Lexical Functional Grammar (OT-LFG), Kuhn defines the notion of an OT-syntactic grammar in a declarative, non-derivational way.

Along with the standard OT architecture, which is based on a generation metaphor, Kuhn also formalizes parsing-based OT, and goes on to discuss possible combinations of these two architectures. This is followed by an examination of assumptions under which the computational tasks of generation and parsing are decidable for an OT-syntactic grammar.

Very little research has been performed on the grammatical structure of sentences in Swedish. Structure, Alignment and Optimality in Swedish is one of the first books to explore the Swedish sentence structure, presenting an account of the order of the words and phrases within the sentence. The book uses the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), which provides syntactic analysis in terms of subject, object, topic, and focus, as well as part-of-speech analysis in terms of noun phrase and verb phrase. The book also uses Optimality Theory, a theory of constraint interpretation that allows constraints to conflict by allowing the satisfaction of certain constraints or requirements to lead to a grammatical structure even if less important constraints are violated.