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Part of
All Things Morphology: Its independence and its interfaces
Edited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 327–348

Chapter 18
A short history of phonology in America

Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change

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Although awareness of a difference between the study of the sound patterns of particular languages and the study of the language-independent capacity of humans to produce and perceive sound existed in European and American thought in the early years of the twentieth century, a clear enunciation of the distinction between phonology and phonetics is due to Otto Jespersen in 1924. As phonology became established as a coherent object of inquiry, two themes can be identified in theorizing about it: first, the question of whether phonological structure is in the mind, as an aspect of human cognition, or only a set of facts about the external data of language; and second, the question of whether there are valid universals of phonological structure. These issues are traced across the past century in the work of American linguists. An additional factor identifiable in historical shifts in theoretical perspective is somewhat less principled: as discussion of fundamental issues becomes more technical and relevant data harder to identify, students and scholars looking for productive research topics tend to abandon previous frameworks for others in a search for lower hanging fruit without necessarily having resolved the earlier questions.

Keywords: cognitive science, constraints, generative phonology, phonemics, rules, universals
Article outline
  • 1.The early history
  • 2.The rise of generative phonology
    • 2.1Phonological structure as an aspect of the mind
    • 2.2The place of universals
  • 3.Phonological theory after Chomsky & Halle (1968)
    • 3.1The logicism of SPE and reaction to it
    • 3.2A focus on representations
    • 3.3The rise of optimality theory
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.353.18and
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