New Mission
Goal for immediate future is to research and compose an original writing sample for grad school applications since the last paper I wrote in theoretical phonology now strikes me as spirited and hearted in the right place but vulgarly naive in some of the specifics. Thus I’ve decided to review the literature surrounding the computational complexity of Optimality Theory (OT). OT is basically the “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” constraint-satisfaction theory of phonology where for a given underlying form, infinitely/indefinitely candidate surface forms are generated and filtered out according to an ordered list of constraints. Put another way, all possible outputs are run through a series of gauntlets and the one that comes out in the best shape is the winner and selected as the output.
The literature consists of proofs that OT is NP-complete and responses to the effect of “ur doing OT wrong”. We’re doing NP-complete proofs in my theory of computation class, so I get to capitalize on and reinforce my knowledge in complexity theory. The formal mathematical reasoning and fine-grained scholarship serve my ultimate rhetorical goal of trying to get accepted, but the exercise will not be trivial as I can study the intricacies of a theory maligned across the board in my linguistics department. So that’s good and I feel good about it. My main issue for writing therefore is coming up with something original to bring to the table. Right now, I’m considering a direction along the lines of “computational intractability is not the end of world; mental representation is.”
