Re: THEORY: Phonology (was: Re: THEORY: vowel harmony)

On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, JOEL MATTHEW PEARSON wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, dirk elzinga wrote:
>
> > One of the properties of natural language phonology that linguists are
> > coming to understand more and more is the role that physiology and
> > acoustics plays in the more abstract sound pattern of a language. (This
> > has always been appreciated, but not well understood, and never
> > formalized.)
>
> This remark would seem to place you firmly within the UCLA Phonology
> camp (if I can call it that), which believes that acoustic factors
> affect phonology, and firmly outside the MIT camp, which seems to
> believe that acoustics and phonology have nothing to do with each
> other... :-)
Well, I'd like to think that I'm part of a middle, moderating camp,
based on the theory presented in _Grounded Phonology_. The Grounding
Hypothesis states that feature cooccurrence statements that are rooted
in phonetic plausibility are more likely to be observed in natural
language and are more likely to be invoked in Grammar. These conditions,
besides being substantively grounded in phonetics, are also formalized
as logic conditional statements. I think this has a nice effect for both
sides: it keeps phonology grounded in phonetic reality, and forces some
kind of formal rigor on phoneticky explanations of sound patterns. My
dissertation was an extended study of Grounding in Gosiute phonology.

What's interesting about the whole functional/formalist debate in
phonology (that's what it ultimately boils down to, after all) is that
both sides can trace their linguistic "pedigree" to the same source:
Morris Halle (and ultimately to Roman Jacobsen). Two of the phoneticky
phonologists at UCLA, Donca Steriade and Bruce Hayes, were Halle's
students at MIT. And Halle's influence at MIT is self-evident and
extends to others such as John McCarthy and Alan Prince, two of the
formalists extrordinaire, who were also students of Halle. If modern
syntax is either elaboration of or reaction to Chomsky, modern phonology
is equally Morris Halle's fault.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                   "All grammars leak."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/                 -Edward Sapir