Re: THEORY: no more URs! [was: Re: Optimum number of symbols]

At 12:26 PM +0100 05/25/02, Raymond Brown wrote:
>At 10:42 am -0600 24/5/02, Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>>At 2:43 AM -0400 05/24/02, Roger Mills wrote:
>>>I realize that, but hope you agree that some sort of underlying level is an
>>>improvement...  Of course, Chomsky/Halle and Classical Phonemics are extreme
>>>and opposite viewpoints,  and the answer, if there is one, probably lies
>>>somewhere between the two....:-)
>>
>>Well, I'm not convinced anymore that a distinction between underlying
>>and surface representations is necessary (or desireable).
>
>Nor am I - indeed, IMO it is undesirable.
>
>[snipped - after reading with interest]
>
>>I am very sympathetic to this idea (no URs); I tried doing something
>>like this in grad school, but I was basically "laughed off the stage"
>>and didn't have the courage to pursue it then.
>
>A pity - how foolish of your grad school.
Let me clarify. It wasn't my graduate program, but rather a
conference I attended in which I presented an analysis of Fula
consonant mutation which made use of the idea that there is no UR. I
wasn't "laughed off the stage" so much as greeted with stony silence.
And then Janet Pierrehumbert asked a very pointed question to which I
couldn't provide a suitably snappy comeback, adding to my
humiliation. (I later thought of a really good answer to her
question, but I never saw her again. It seems to me that conference
presentations are judged as much by the ability of the presenter to
provide instant and insightful analysis of hypothetical situations
posed by the questioner as by a reasoned, carefully thought out
presentation. I don't think well on my feet, so I come off looking
pretty dim when I present.)

My teachers in my grad program were generally supportive of the
UR-less idea, but the intellectual climate of the time was definitely
against the move (at least in the circles they moved in; come to find
out later, there were plenty of people who took the idea seriously --
including the institution I'm at now), so they advised me to assume a
more traditional stance in my work in order to make me more
marketable. It also didn't really play a role in what I was doing in
a significant way, so to include the UR-less idea could have been
seen as needlessly provocative.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                  Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

Man deth swa he byth thonne he mot swa he wile.
'A man does as he is when he can do what he wants.'

- Old English Proverb

Replies