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Chapter 1, 'An introduction to Optimality Theory', gives a general introduction to OT, outlining the context in which the theory was developed and the basic components of the theory: Con (a set of constraints), Eval (an evaluation metric), Gen (resulting in a set of possible realisations of a linguistic expression) and the concept of minimal violation. It addresses some of the issues that newcomers to OT often find difficult to accept, including the notion that constraints can be violated (with brief comparison to an alternative approach using parameterised constraints). OT is built upon two fundamental hypotheses: that constraints are part of Universal Grammar (though not necessarily innate; this debate is reviewed in section 4.7) and that constraints are universal (all constraints operate in every language). According to McCarthy, OT is a formal system which provides tools for investigating the ranking of violable constraints, but has nothing to say about the nature of those constraints, nor the structural representations that they manipulate, beyond the fundamental premise that the constraints involved in the grammar are of two types only: markedness and faithfulness.
Chapter 2, 'How to construct an analysis', is the meat of the book. It opens in 2.1 with advice on how to identify suitable data for analysis and formulate a good descriptive generalisation of it, and in particular how to state that generalisation in a way that will lead to a workable analysis within OT. Section 2.2 sets out the tools of an OT analysis. Essential to the process is a ranking argument, necessarily comprising a conflict (a set of possible output realisations on which two or more constraints disagree), a winner (the actual realisation) and a lack of disjunction between winner-favouring constraints. McCarthy explains the formal notions of total and partial ordering of constraints, as well as (more practically) how to tell when the analysis is 'finished'. The chapter then explores different notational conventions that have been proposed for illustrating ranking arguments, that is, different types of tableaux, explaining the advantages and disadvantages of each. McCarthy proposes a hybrid type - the combination tableau - which combines the properties of a classic violation tableau (Prince & Smolensky 1993) with some of the presentational advantages of a comparative tableau...