Optimality Theory in phonology is a textbook for an advanced-level phonology course that contains excerpts from 33 important articles and manuscripts on Optimality Theory (OT). For each chapter, McCarthy adds brief introductory notes and a list of study and research questions. The introductory notes provide background information and short remarks on the significance of the selected works. The study and research questions help readers to understand the material, and some questions are challenging enough to lead to interesting topics for research. Given the rapid development of OT in the past decade, it is not an easy task to compile such a reader. Overall, McCarthy makes excellent selections, and this book would be a useful textbook for many phonology classes. This text would also be appropriate for independent study, but those who are not familiar with OT may want to read Kager's (1999) introductory textbook before reading this volume. For an in-depth survey and overview of OT and an extensive list of references, the reader is referred to McCarthy (2002).

Optimality Theory in phonology consists of five parts. Part 1, “The Basics,” contains three chapters from classic works that set the foundation and mark the major theoretical developments of OT. Chapter 1, an extended excerpt from the first monograph-length technical report on OT by Prince and Smolensky, introduces the basic tenets and major theoretical and technical aspects of OT. Two major groups of constraints are presented for the analysis of syllable structure and its typology: faithfulness constraints, which regulate input-output identity, and markedness constraints, which demand unmarked structures in the output. The next two chapters introduce alignment constraints, which require the edges of grammatical and prosodic categories to coincide, and correspondence constraints, which require identity between two corresponding representations (e.g., input and output, base and reduplicant). The three chapters in part 2, “Formal Analysis,” present formal modeling of computation (chapters 4 and 6) and learnability in OT (chapter 5). Part 3, “Prosody,” consists of seven chapters dealing with issues and analyses related to stress and tone (chapters 7–13). There are eight chapters (chapters 14–21) on segmental processes and patterns in part 4, “Segmental Phonology,” the topics of which range from postnasal voicing, vowel harmony, dissimilation, assimilation, and neutralization, to chain shift, feature theory, and phonetically driven phonology. “Interfaces,” the final section of the book, includes 11 chapters that focus on phonology-morphology interactions (chapters 22–32) and one chapter that covers language variation and change (chapter 33). Many familiar areas and issues in morphophonology (e.g., level ordering, cyclicity and the derived environment effects in Lexical Phonology, prosodic morphology, lexical exceptions, the structure of the lexicon, and allomorphy) are recast from OT perspectives. Overall, a wide range of topics are covered in reasonable proportions with one exception: there is only one chapter on how phonetics is involved in explaining phonological patterning (chapter 15). Given that studies in this area have played an increasingly important role in the field of phonology, it seems reasonable to allocate more space to this topic.

Although all the chapters deal with theoretical and formal issues in phonology, researchers specializing in phonological acquisition and phonological variation and change will find various portions in the book relevant to their research. One basic tenet of OT is that all languages have the same set of universal constraints, with languages differing only by how these constraints are ranked. This leads to a model in which developmental stages in language acquisition and language change can be conceived of as processes of ranking and reranking of constraints. Thus, language variation constitutes a stage at which the ranking of certain constraints is undetermined and therefore flexible. Chapter 5, “Learnability in Optimality Theory” by Tesar and Smolensky, presents a formal model in which a learner's task is simply to acquire a constraint ranking (i.e., a grammar) and a lexicon. Because a second language learner already possesses a constraint ranking for his or her first language, the process of SLA can be more complicated to model; therefore, any work combining SLA and OT can be of empirical and theoretical interest.

In short, Optimality Theory in phonology provides an impressive collection of OT papers that cover a wide range of topics and issues. It is not only a useful textbook for phonology but also presents to nonspecialists the innovative aspects of OT.