On Phonological Representations as Equilibra among Phonological Computational Device

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The overall research scheme has been to reconstruct the framework of the general theory of phonology based on Game Theory. Within the framework, a set of phonological gadget are postulated to produce an optimal equilibrium among those gadgets. The present research elucidated the fact that the phonological processes in natural languages are equilibria among those articulatory and auditory computational device, and it goes on to construct a general theory of phonology that is truly verifiable. The notion of "equilibrium" comes from the notion of Nash Equilibrium within the realm of social sciences.The present research tried to realize a linguistic model in which the relationships among phonological computational gadgets are assumed to be relative so as to arrive at an optimal phonological representation that is evaluated highest in the payoff matrix assumed in the phonological computation assumed there. The present framework crucially differs from the tenet of Optimality Theory in that t … More he outputs of the grammatical system are finite : Optimality Theory assumes that the phonological outputs are essentially infinite and that the optimal representation is selected by the procedure of the evaluation of the outputs by the ranked universal constraints.If we focus our attention on the real-time processing in the brain / mind, our model is well-motivated with respect to the psychological reality of the linguistic computation.A significant corollary of the present approach is that we may do away with the devices of correspondence rules in the Tripartite Parallel Architecture proposed in Jackendoff's work. In our model the correspondence among phonological, syntactic and conceptual modules is worked out by the calculation done in the payoff matrices.The second corollary is that the theoretical foundation of the semantics and contextual-pragmatic computation are unified into the general tenet of our game-theoretic approach. The point has been the identification of the level of the unit of agentive elements. In our approach, a person can be a agentive element in a certain framework, while in the phonological description we assume that one person internalizes more than one computational gadget, or sub-agents. Conversely, a group of persons can also be an agent as a whole. The theoretical homogeneity of the three level may contribute to our understand of the unification of the theoretical linguistics and the theory of communication. Less