Arto Anttila (Stanford University) 
Variation and Phonological Theory

In this talk, Arto Anttila will review some recent developments in the
study of phonological variation. Traditionally studied mainly by
variationist sociolinguists and phoneticians, phonological variation has
become a central topic in generative phonology under Optimality Theory
and there are several competing proposals on the market. I will give an
overview of three optimality-theoretic models of variation and try to
identify their empirical strengths and weaknesses. Of particular
interest is the question of how these phonological models can be related
to morphology, the lexicon, and sociolinguistics.