The work in this book was conducted over a period of several years. During that time, I have benefitted significantly from conversations with a number of people, including Crystal Akers, Eric Baković, Karen Campbell, Paul de Lacy, Jane Grimshaw, Fernando Guzman, Brett Hyde, Gaja Jarosz, John McCarthy, Nazarré Merchant, Alan Prince, Jason Riggle, and Paul Smolensky. I also received useful feedback from several audiences who kindly listened to various incarnations of pieces of this work: the Rutgers Optimality Reading Group (RORG), the Mathematics Association of America Seaway Section and New York Association of Two Year Colleges Fall 2007 Meeting, several meetings of the Northeast Computational Phonology Circle, the Learnability Meets Acquisition Workshop at the 31st Jahrestagung der Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Osnabrück, NELS39, the Seventh North American Phonology Conference, the Linguistics Department at SUNY Stony Brook, and the Linguistics and Cognitive Science Department at the University of Delaware. Useful comments were also provided by three Cambridge University Press reviewers. Exceptional patience was exhibited by the students of two incarnations of my Seminar on Learnability and Linguistic Theory (Ling670), as well one incarnation of Phonology III (Ling522).

All factual errors and bizarre-sounding conceptions are the sole responsibility of the author.

Special thanks are due to Alan Prince for suggesting the term “output-driven.”

I wish to thank, for institutional support, the Department of Linguistics and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS), at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick.

I would like to thank Helen Barton, of Cambridge University Press, for her support of this project and her assistance in getting this work into print.

I wish to express gratitude to my wife, Esther, and my daughters, Heidi and Amanda, for their support and exceptional tolerance of the countless hours I spent in my basement office, working on “the book.” Special thanks to Heidi and Amanda for loving me despite the fact that I do not like ketchup.