1. Introduction ; 1.2 The foundations of optimality theory.- 2.1 Conflicting violable constraints ; 2.2 Factorial typology and the grounding of constraints ; 2.3 Summary.- 3 some observations about optimality-theoretic syntax.- 3.1 On the motivation of syntactic OT constraints ; 3.2 Faithfulness violations in phonology and syntax ; 3.3 Learning and the character of the input ; 3.4 Summary.- 4. The formalization of OT syntax in the LFG framework ; 4.1 Background on the lexical-functional grammar (LFG) formalism ; 4.2 Optimality-theoretic LFG: the overall architecture ; 4.3 Candidate generation and the inviolable principles ; 4.4 The violable constraints: markedness constraints ; 4.5 Faithfulness constraints ; 4.6 Summary.- 5. The direction of optimization ; 5.1 Varying the input to optimization ; 5.2 The character of comprehension-based optimization ; 5.3 Bidirectional optimization ; 5.4 Summary.- 6. Computational OT syntax ; 6.1 Processing issues for OT-LFG ; 6.2. Decidability of OT-LFG generation ; 6.3 Recognition and parsing for OT-LFG ; 6.4 Summary.- 7. Conclusion.