A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Clausal Linkage in Japanese

We are witnessing the development of three major approaches to the constitution of the component that generates optimal candidate sets of the outputs of the grammar of the individual language under investigation: (i) Minimalist Program by Noam Chomsky, (ii) Tripartite Parallel Architecture by Ray Jackendoff, and (iii) Optimality Theory by Prince, Smolensky and McCarthy. Adopting (i) the ground-breaking ideas of Game Theory (cf. Dixit and Skeath (2004)) John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern and John Nash and (ii) the thesis by Marvin Minsky that our consciousness is a set of elements of sub-conscious agents that are hierarchically organized, the present paper submits an argument to the effect that the set of optimal candidates from the grammar of a language is a set of optimal equilibria among grammatical sub-agents, which I will call grammatical gadgets. A significant corollary to our standpoint is that we may do away with what are called the correspondent rules in Tripartite Parallel Architecture; to rephrase this in our terms, the optimal correspondences in the semantics-pragmatics interface can be identified as the optimal equilibria among strategies that are given by syntactic and pragmatic gadgets. The paper proceeds as follows. The second section describes the overview of our game-theoretic approach to the theory of language. The Third section is concerned with the phenomena of mismatch in the clausal linkage in English and Japanese. The Fourth section takes up the phenomena of coarticulation in English and what is called High Vowel Deletion in Japanese.