Constructionist OT. The case of German verb inflection

I explore the properties of a variant of OT morpho-syntax that is based on the standard OT mechanism of markedness/faithfulness interaction. For this variant to play out successfully, the idea of universally specified input structures is given up. Instead, language particular input structures are used, as it is generally assumed that there can only be language particular lexicons, not universal ones. For the description of these input structures, a constructionist representation is proposed. The core idea of this approach is that a construction consists in a set of components, both on the form and the meaning side. These components, in fact, are constraints on the form of linguistic expressions that are instances of the respective constructions. Morphological faithfulness, then, is the fulfilment of these component constraints. As it turns out in my exemplary analysis of inflectional patterns in the present tense singular forms of German verbs, the assumption that faithfulness to components is violable leads to a simpler grammatical analysis that avoids the assumption of inflectional subclasses with differing, but regular and predictable patterns. The basic mechanism is an OT-style interaction of phonological and morphological faithfulness.