Re: Math/Phonological formulae

On 2/6/07, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> Dirk wrote:
> <<
> Not much. It's pretty much been replaced by Optimality Theory.
>  >>
>
> Now, I wasn't at the LSA this year (ironic, because I was literally
> moving into a place two and a half minutes away, in a city bordering
> Anaheim the Infernal One called Stanton), but apparently at the
> general session (excuse the term if it's wrong) on phonology,
> attended by a lot of the old school folks (Halle among them), something
> quite close to the following was said: "Clearly neither SPE rules
> nor OT constraints are good enough to explain the phonological
> phenomena seen in natural language.  We need something else."
> This was told me by a friend of mine who was in attendance.  The
> remarkable thing (to me, at least) is that apparently no one objected.
> <rant>(Which would be great, because OT has REALLY side-tracked
> phonology!  It's terrible!  Whatever good it has done for the field
> of linguistics has already been achieved: let it go the way of RG!  It's
> day has passed!)</rant>
Ranting aside, whenever *any* theory takes precedence over the
description and explication of natural language phenomena, it has
sidetracked linguistics. OT provides some insight into the interaction
of real phonological patterns, and as such, it is a useful tool. But
it isn't (or shouldn't) be the only tool in the toolkit. It's only now
that "mainstream" phonologists are coming to grips with things like
gradience, variation and frequency effects--which wouldn't have
happened if it weren't for OT. Not that OT has good explanations for
these things, but it sharpened the questions to the point where
phonologists are finally willing (or forced) to deal with them.

Dirk