GENERATIVE PHONOLOGY To study linguistict that tradition meanst first and foremost to master the technique of reducing a welter

of phonetic data to an elegant system of phonemes. When the descriptivists dealing with theory and practice of phonemic anasis than with any other topic certainly than deal with syntax, and was heavily influenced by notions which had proved useful in phonology. For example use of term morph/allomorph/morpheme parallel with phone/allophone/phoneme. Chomskys syntactic theory is called generative for the good reason that it deals with all and only the phonologically well-formed sequences of language that is one thing that it does not rather current phonological theorizing is called generative, purely because it is related to and is practised by the same people as generative syntax. Generative phonologist, like transformational grammarians, are primarily concerned to work out general theories about limits to the diversity of natural language. Generative phonologist are concerned only secondarily if at all with producing detailed and useful descriptions of phonological phenomena of individual languages for their own sake. Generative phonology in fact began as development of Roman Jacobsons work on phonological universals, but as this tradition became naturalized in America in the 1950s shifted its attention to universals of another kind. In the modern sense is essensially the distinctive feature theory to explain the phenomena of morphonemic alternation. The term morphonemic alternation is used for cases, common in most language, where given morpheme exhibits. Blomfield and many of his followers, had tended to write as if the elementary phonological building-block of language were its phonemes. It is not in fact at all clear that Blomfield himself intended phonemes to be more than convenient ways of talking about simultanious bundles of distinctive parameter values because phonemes can be symbolized by alphabetic letters and utterance can be described phonemically in a linear fashion similar to parameter values separately we have to resort to a cumbersome system

of transcription in which uttrance are represented as two dimentional matrices in which rows correspond to parameters, columns to successive temporal segments, and cells are filled by symbols representing the various values possiblle for parameter in whose row cell occurs. If phonemes are the primitive units of our theory then procesess affecting individual phoneme will be simple to state within theory than processing affecting groups of phonemes, which would have to be listed one by one. Not only can morphonemic data be used to show that phonology must deal in phonetic feature rather than in unitary segment, a point which is only marginally controversial they also provide evidence for against alternative hyphoteses about the nature of the set of universal distinctive feature, which is more interesting. The true German rule is not that stops alone lose their voice word-finally but all and only obstruent do so that with for example the adjective brav gallant and miesweedy. The fact that both stops and fricatives lose their voice word-finally would be a surprising coincidence, if stops and fricatives were treated by the theory as unrelated classes of sounds having nothing in common as against the other sound types but it is predicted,if stops and fricative are merely sub varieties of basic class of obstruents. The trouble is that once we take morphonemic evidence into account. Jacobson theory of twelve universal distinctive features soon looks very shaky. The pair obstruent/sonorant was in fact among the original twelve but les consider an even worse case, where evidence seem not merely to call for an additional feature but to argue against the features already in main values, as the sound [ptk]. Three values parameter are awkward for theory dealing in binary feature. Design problems of this kind, for many years Jakobsons successors in the development of generative phonology maintaned their belief in the correctnest of the original set of twelve feature. In 1966s Noah Chomky was still claiming that the feature of Preliminaries to Speech Analysis were the correct one. It gives up entirely the notion that certain articulatory distinct parameters are psychologically equivalent and instead takes the articulatory parameters. Two of anti descriptivist

aspect of Jakobsonian phonology speech sounds form a natural hierarchy rather than being equal and notion that all distinctive features are pcycologicalling binary. Linguist soon changed their mind about the relevance of information theory to their discipline, and the notion that the Jakobsonian distinctive features might have more direct meaning in accoustic than in articulatory terms did not survive subsequent in accoustic research. Once it is recognized that the binarity theory is an empirical claim if it is anything at all fact such as thevdiffering number of distinctive degrees of vowel aperture in French as against English bocome prima facie refutations of the theory if the correct feature + / High and + / - low allowing the three level of English then a four level language like French should be impossible. This may or may not be phonetically defensible, the obvious risk is that the more of this apparently ad hoc modification are made, the less testable the theory become until it ends up entirely vacuous. The most influential generative phonological treatment of tone is by William wang whose analysis is cited by Chomsky and Halle. Wang presents a set of binary feature which can be used to represent not only pitches but the relatively complex counter tones found in Far Eastern Languages. Since pitch can be measured accurately it is easy to show that Wangs binary feature fail to make true prediction about the acn onlytual physical nature of the tone-contour in language, if Wang analysis has any substance at all, it can only be in terms of morphophonemic rather than surface phonetics and it is how Wang seeks to justify his treatment. He argues for correctness of his feature set by showing that it permits a unified relatively simple statement of a superficially highly complex pattern of morphophonemic alternation among the tones of Hokkien, a dialect of Chinese. Wangs claim about the binary treatment of tone depends entirely on how restrictive his notation. The fact that the Amoy data can be described by the rule of Wangs theory, provided that pattern of tone alteration actually found in Amoy is alternation between a comparable range of units in permitting a rule of such relatively simplicity. As an example of the kind of argumentation used to support

the notion of binary distinctive features Wangs article is untypical only being relatively clear and therefore aesily pinned down. Infer that this strand of generative phonological thought is whrolly bankrupt, and that where a phonetic parameter is physically capable of taking a large range of values, the number and identity of parameter values which is used distinctively is quite likely differ unpredictable from one language to other. The notion of a universal alphabet however is only one way and in recent years not the most important in which generative phonologist have claimed to offer evidence for the Chomskyan view that language are organized in our minds according to principles very different from anything that could be immediately infered from the superficial forms our utterances, the other central strand in current generative phonology has to do with pattern of morphophonemic rules, as opposed to the feature. On whole the descriptivists had not discussed in depth the formal properties of the rules governing alternations between sounds of a languge. The reasons was that most Descriptivists tended to concentrate on giving explicit statement between phoneme and allophones as these relationships tended to be fairly simple,subletis of formalization were irrelevant. But the descriptivist tended not to carry out detailed analyses at the morphophonemic level because they were primarily interested in the problem of how hearers abstract out of the wealth of phonetic detail in an utterance just those feature which carry communicative value in the language in the question. Knowing that one need pay no attention to the question wheter a lateral is velarized or not because in english both clear l and dark l are allophone of one morpheme /l/ is a matter of knowing the phonological system of English. In the light of earlier comment on the notion of a universal phonetic alfabet, we can see that Halle has shown here rather is different from what he thinks he has shown. If phonemes were credited with an existance of their own over and above the distintive parameter values that make them up, we have already accepted Halle by means original point that phonemes are only convenient abbrevation for bundles of simultaneous parameter values. Halle has not shown that the phonemicist believed in a redudant third level of representation between

the abstract level of morphophonemes and the concrete of physical phonetic. Most morphophonemic alternations in a language like English occur not in productive constructions in a language like English occur not in productive construction such as pluralization of noun. But in non productive derivational process whereby affixation and coumponding are used to form complex vocabulary items. The obvious objection is that the generative phonologist are doing here is using the clues left behind by past events to reconstruct the history of the language showing how it is organized in the maind of a modern speaker. Those who attack generative phonology along these lines are commonly met by the counter argument that whether or not the morphophonemic alternation modeern English were brought into being by historical events of the distance past, neverthless they are fact of the modern language and must be description of modern English. Generative phonologists point of view in which phonological system exist in peoples minds as sequences of rules one obvious way in which a language might change phonologically would be the addition of a new rule to the sequence but the generative phonology has no reason to expect such new rules to appear at any particular place they might up at the beginning, midle and ends. The first of phonological rules like syntatic transformations, apply cyclically, it seem at least prima facial difficult to see how a cycle rules could be interpreted diachronically, since it would be somewhat absurd to think of procesess of this kind occuring in regular cycles through theory. Cyclical rules seem fairly clearly But whereas this might be persuasive if the cyclical principle permitted the complex stress pattern of English words to be predicted by relatively simple rules,in fact SPE stress rules are both highly complex and depend on assigment of constituency, many writers who are otherwise true believe in generative phonology have argued that non cyclical rules are equally adequate for word stress. An obvious question about Smiths theory is why on earth should children do anything so perverse as distort their speech by means of incompetence rules? If

there is a simplest or most unmarked type phonology for human language then it may be quite a sensible strategy for the child to begin by assumming that the speech he is hearing examplifies that simple system and that all the apparent complexity is due to irrelevant subphonemic variation which he may safely ignore a position from which the child then retreat step by step as the the evidance shows that some phonetic distinction is after all constructive in the adult language. At least one leading theoritician has come to the view that we store our vocabulary not in terms of underlying phonetic forms of roots, but simply in terms of the surface pronounciation word with separate entries for each of their various derivational and inflectional forms. This new trends is sometime Generative Phonology, making it sound as if it intercorporated some novel theoritical insight. A better name might be Commonsense Phonologyit boils down to the view One factor which enabled the theory of binary phonetic feature to survive is that, to put it bluntly, American linguists trend not to be very good at what. This aspect of theory may well not emerge from my account, in any case the kind of enjoyment to be derived from generative phonological analysis is no doubt a minority taste. Once generative phonology is reinterpreted as reconstruction of history, the situation become very different. There is no scientific value in reconstructing just those parts of history of language which can be inferred from morphophonemic alternations that happen to have survived to the present. Historical reconstruction is a worthy enterprise, but those who undertake it are bound to use whatever source of data are available and these will never be confined to a few reference books. One must spend long hours and weeks studying old and inaccessible manuscripts, one must learn and learn thoroughly other related language for the light they shed on the past of the langauge in question.