Pied-piping and preposition stranding in terms of Optimality Theory

There are two positions of a wh-word and related preposition in English: so-called pied-piping, occurrence of a wh-word immediately preceded by a preposition at the beginning of a clause, or preposition stranding, occurrence of only a wh-word at the beginning of a clause with a preposition left behind. This is not always the case. Romance languages like French and Italian only allow pied-piping. This paper shows that these differences between languages can be captured well in terms of Optimality Theoretic approach, i.e. the interaction of *Prep stranding which says that a preposition must be a sister to its object and Align which says that the left edge of an interrogative should be aligned with the left edge of CP. The tied ranking of *Prep stranding and Align yields preposition stranding sentences as well as pied-piping ones as optimal in current English. The strict ranking of *Prep stranding 》 Align yields pied-piping ones as optimal in case of Romance languages. This result is consistent with the Optimality Theoretic assumption that language variations can be explained in terms of the change in the rank of the constraints.