Fonologia Gestual e Teoria da Otimidade

In this essay I reflect on linguistic analyses that regard the articulatory gesture as an indexer of constraints – and, therefore, as a phonological primitive – in the light of Optimality Theory (OT). Firstly, I am going to review the main topics of the proposal related to the gesture, constituted by landmarks, as a representational primitive in OT. Subsequently, I am going to discuss changes proposed to the original model, as well as controversial issues on the implementation of the gesture in a constraint-based approach. One of the main problems concerning the slow pace of research on OT and Gestural Phonology in the last decade seems to be in the realization of the changes proposed to the theory, more than in the controversial issues.