This breakthrough study argues for a significant link between phonetics and phonology. Its authors propose that phonological rules and representations are tightly constrained by the interaction of formal conditions drawn from a limited universal pool and substantive conditions of a phonetically motivated nature. They support this proposal through principled accounts of a variety of topics such as vowel harmony, neutrality, and under specification.Unlike much work on this topic, Archangeli and Pulleyblank provide an explicit account of their assumptions, defined in a comprehensive theory of phonological rules and representations. The authors survey an impressive range of data, including an investigation of cross-linguistic patterns of ATR Harmony. They demonstrate that their theory is flexible enough to account for variation in individual phonological systems, yet it is firmly constrained by a small set of well-motivated principles. Extensive references throughout the book to published and unpublished work provide a valuable roadmap through this semicharted terrain.The approach in Grounded Phonology is modular, in that it presents a theory composed of subtheories, each of which is independently motivated, and the role of each module is to constrain the range of possibilities (of wellformedness)in its domain. Differences among languages can arise from differing intramodular selections or from interaction among modules.Diana Archangeli is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Douglas Pulleyblank is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia.
To what extent do complex phonological patterns require the postulation of universal mechanisms specific to language? In this volume, we explore the Emergent Hypothesis, that the innate language-specific faculty driving the shape of adult grammars is minimal, with grammar development relying instead on cognitive capacities of a general nature. Generalisations about sounds, and about the way sounds are organised into meaningful units, are constructed in a bottom-up fashion: As such, phonology is emergent. We present arguments for considering the Emergent Hypothesis, both conceptually and by working through an extended example in order to demonstrate how an adult grammar might emerge from the input encountered by a learner. Developing a concrete, data-driven approach, we argue that the conventional, abstract notion of unique underlying representations is unmotivated; such underlying representations would require some innate principle to ensure their postulation by a learner. We review the history of the concept and show that such postulated forms result in undesirable phonological consequences. We work through several case studies to illustrate how various types of phonological patterns might be accounted for in the proposed framework. The case studies illustrate patterns of allophony, of productive and unproductive patterns of alternation, and cases where the surface manifestation of a feature does not seem to correspond to its morphological source. We consider cases where a phonetic distinction that is binary seems to manifest itself in a way that is morphologically ternary, and we consider cases where underlying representations of considerable abstractness have been posited in previous frameworks. We also consider cases of opacity, where observed phonological properties do not neatly map onto the phonological generalisations governing patterns of alternation.
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