The Oxford History of Phonology B Elan Dresher Editor Full Chapter

The Oxford History of Phonology B.
Elan Dresher (Editor)

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-oxford-history-of-phonology-b-elan-dresher-editor
/
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/2/2022, SPi
The Oxford History of Phonology

The Oxford History

of Phonology
Edited by
B. ELAN DRESHER
and
HARRY VAN DER HULST
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© editorial matter and organization B. Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst 2022
© the chapters their several authors 2022
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936958
ISBN 978–0–19–879680–0
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796800.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables ix

List of Abbreviations xiii
The Contributors xvii
1. Introduction: Leading ideas in phonology 1

B. Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst
I. EARLY INSIGHTS IN PHONOLOGY

2. Writing systems 19
Richard Sproat
:
3. Pānini 38
Paul Kiparsky
4. The East Asian tradition 64
San Duanmu and Haruo Kubozono
5. The tas: rīf in the medieval Arabic grammatical tradition 83
Georges Bohas and Jean Lowenstamm
6. The Greco-Roman tradition 109
Ranjan Sen
7. Phonological phrasing: Approaches to grouping at lower levels
of the prosodic hierarchy 134
Aditi Lahiri and Frans Plank
8. Nineteenth-century historical linguists’ contributions to phonology 163
Joseph Salmons
II. THE FOUNDERS OF PHONOLOGY
9. The Kazan School: Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikołaj Kruszewski 179
Joanna Radwańska-Williams
10. Saussure and structural phonology 203
John E. Joseph
11. The Prague School: Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson 221
Edwin Battistella
12. John R. Firth and the London School 242
Elena Battaner Moro and Richard Ogden
vi 
13. Boas—Sapir—Bloomfield: The synchronicization of phonology in

American linguistics 260
Michael Silverstein
14. The (early) history of sign language phonology 284
Harry van der Hulst
III. MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY
DEVELOPMENTS IN PHONOLOGY
15. Phonology in the Soviet Union 309
Pavel Iosad
16. Phonology in Glossematics in Northern and Western Europe 331
Hans Basbøll
17. Mid-century American phonology: The post-Bloomfieldians 356
D. Robert Ladd
18. Developments leading towards generative phonology 372
B. Elan Dresher and Daniel Currie Hall
19. The Sound Pattern of English and early generative phonology 396
Michael J. Kenstowicz
IV. PHONOLOGY AFTER SPE
20. Phonological derivation in early generative phonology 419

Michael J. Kenstowicz and Charles W. Kisseberth
21. Representations in generative phonology in the 1970s and 1980s 440
Charles W. Kisseberth
22. The interaction between phonology and morphosyntax in
generative grammar 462
Tobias Scheer
23. Dependency Phonology 485
Jørgen Staun
24. Government Phonology in historical perspective 509
Nancy A. Ritter
25. Historical notes on constraint-and-repair approaches 530
Andrea Calabrese
26. Optimality Theory 551
Marc van Oostendorp
27. The study of variation 569
Josef Fruehwald
 vii
V. NEW METHODS AND APPROACHES

28. Phonetic explanation in phonology 593
John Kingston
29. Corpora and phonological analysis 619
Kathleen Currie Hall
30. More than seventy years of probabilistic phonology 639
Janet B. Pierrehumbert
31. Phonological theory and computational modelling 656
Jane Chandlee and Adam Jardine
32. Learnability in phonology 677
Jeffrey Heinz and Jonathan Rawski
33. Phonology and evolution 694
Bart de Boer
References 707
Name Index 817
Language Index 832
Subject Index 835
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
2.1. Planar taxonomy of writing systems 23
2.2. The sonority hierarchy 28
2.3. Blissymbols for ‘table’, ‘chair’, and ‘chest of drawers’ 35
2.4. Blissymbols for ‘love’ and ‘mind’ 35
2.5. Blissymbols for ‘writer’ and ‘taxes’ 35
2.6. Blissymbols for ‘horse’, ‘mule’, and ‘ass’ 35
2.7. ‘Red’, ‘orange’, ‘yellow’, ‘Persian blue’ 35
7.1. A sample of Steele’s Prosodia Rationalis analysis 136
7.2. Saran’s ganzes metrisches Gebäude exemplified 144
13.1. Sapir’s Language A: Full phonetic and ‘objective’ inventory of sound segments 270
13.2. Sapir’s Language A: Phonological structure posited 271
14.1. Signs for HAPPY, ACCENT, ACTOR, and DISAPPEAR 286
14.2. Sequential model of Liddell & Johnson (1985, 1989) 298
16.1. System of oppositions of the Danish vowels 343
18.1. Correspondences between ‘logical’ (phonetic) and ‘actual’ (phonological) oppositions 374
18.2. Consonant place features proposed by Jakobson ([1939a] 1962) 375
18.3. Cherry et al.’s (1953) contrastive hierarchy for Russian 384
18.4. Two orderings of [continuant] and [voiced] 391
18.5. Levels in post-Bloomfieldian American structuralist phonology 392
21.1. Feature geometry proposed by Clements (1985: 229) 451
21.2. Icelandic preaspiration rule (Clements 1985: 233) 452
29.1. Relationship between minimal pair count and merger, from Wedel, Kaplan,
& Jackson (2013: 183) 634
31.1. A finite-state acceptor and the set of strings it describes 658
31.2. Finite-state transducers corresponding to simultaneous (T₁) and iterative (T₂)
application of the rule a ! b / b __ 658
31.3. Derivation of the output of T₁ (left) and T₂ (right) for an input baaa. The first
row in each diagram shows the input string; the middle row shows the transition
between states given each input symbol; and the final row shows the output at
each transition 659
31.4. Autosegmental representation of the association of morphemes to produce the
surface form for the Arabic verb stem [kattab] ‘to write (caus.)’
(McCarthy 1979, 1986) 662
x     
31.5. Linearization under Kay (1987)’s proposal of the autosegmental diagram for
[kattab] (adapted from Bird & Ellison 1994). Here, G refers to the first of a
geminate consonant; this prevents the consonantal stem tape from moving forward 662
31.6. Examples of Kornai (1995)’s scanning code 663
31.7. A simple autosegmental representation and its corresponding synchronized FSA
from Bird & Ellison (1994: 67) 665
31.8. Constituent timeline representations for CVC.V (left) and CV.CV (right) 667
31.9. A weighted acceptor for C and V transitions 670
31.10. A fragment of a weighted context-free grammar for English syllable structure
(adapted from Coleman & Pierrehumbert 1997). (Only the rules generating the
syllable pæt are shown.) 671
31.11. Constraints with a stochastic ranking (Boersma & Hayes 2002) 672
31.12. Scanning interpretation of SL grammar 675
32.1. Natural language patterns within the Chomsky hierarchy 681
32.2. The subset principle 685
Tables
4.1. Correspondences between Chinese characters and kana syllabary 74
4.2. Modern gojūon-zu (table of sounds) 75
8.1. Differences between Neogrammarian change and lexical diffusion 173
11.1. Jakobsonian distinctive features 236
12.1. Carnochan’s analysis of the phonological structure of gemination in Hausa 247
12.2. Extract of the right part of Table 12.1 249
12.3. Orthography and phonological formulae for rows 2 and 3 of Table 12.1 250
12.4. Prosodic sub-systems of P3 for the formulae in Table 12.1 251
15.1. Examples of Russian verbal classes 314
15.2. Examples of morphologically conditioned alternations 315
16.1. System of oppositions of the Danish modulations 337
16.2. System of oppositions of the Danish accents 338
16.3. System of oppositions (glossemes) of the Danish consonants 340
o
16.4. System of oppositions of the category III of the French pseudo-consonants 347
o
16.5. System of oppositions of the category IV of the French pseudo-consonants 348
16.6. Høysgaard’s Aandelav representing four syllable types 350
18.1. Combining two binary features into one ternary one 376
27.1. Morphological boundaries and TD Deletion rates 578
27.2. TD Deletion in lexical phonology 580
27.3. Probability of TD Retention at each level 580
27.4. l-darkening processes that can apply to bell 581
27.5. l-darkening processes that can apply to mail it 581
27.6. Predicted TD Deletion rates given at most just one specified precedence relation 584
     xi
28.1. Minimal contrasts represented by the acoustic-auditory features [compact]

versus [diffuse] and [grave] versus [acute] 597
28.2. Minimal contrasts represented by the articulatory features [anterior], [coronal],
[high], [low], and [back] 598
28.3. Application = non-suppression (+) versus suppression () of denasalization, a
fortition process (F), and/or nasalization, a lenition process (L), in Hawaiian,
Hindi, English, and French 610
28.4. Similarities and differences between Optimality Theory and Natural Phonology 612
List of Abbreviations
AAC Augmentative and Alternative Communication

ACLS American Council of Learned Societies
AGs Arab grammarians
AI Artificial Intelligence
AP Autosegmental Phonology
ARR Auxiliary Reduction Rule
AS American Structuralism
ASL American Sign Language
ASR Alternating Stress Rule
ACL-SIGMORPHON Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group in
Computational Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology
BAS Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals
CGP Classical Generative Phonology
C&H Chomsky and Halle
CL clitic
CLC Cercle linguistique de Copenhague
CLS Chicago Linguistic Society
DASL A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles
DCL directional clitic
DM Distributed Morphology
DOT Derivational Optimality Theory
DP Dependency Phonology
DSGS Deutschschweizer Gebärdensprache
DTE designated terminal element
ECP Empty Category Principle
EvoLang evolution of language
FD Final Devoicing
FPA Firthian Prosodic Analysis
FREQ frequentative aspect
FSA finite-state acceptor
FSTs finite-state transducers
FUL Featurally Underspecified Lexicon
GB Government & Binding Theory
GLA Gradual Learning Algorithm
GLOW Generative Linguistics in the Old World
GOFAI Good Old-Fashioned AI
GP Government Phonology
H heavy syllable
HamNoSys Hamburg Notation System
HG Harmonic Grammar
IAST International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
IE Indo-European
INDET indeterminate
xiv   
INF infinitive
IP Intonational Phrase
IPA International Phonetic Alphabet
IPFV imperfective aspect
KLC Kazan Linguistic Circle
KLV Kaye, Lowenstamm, and Vergnaud
KSN Koutsoudas, Sanders, & Noll
L light syllable
LAPSyD Lyon-Albuquerque Phonological Systems Database
LingPy Python library for historical linguistics
LOT Linear Optimality Theory
LSA Linguistic Society of America
LSJ Liddell, Scott, and Jones
maxent maximum entropy
ML Machine Learning
MLE Multicultural London English
MM Markedness Module
MSCs morpheme structure conditions (constraints)
MSR Main Stress Rule
NGP Natural Generative Phonology
NELS North East Linguistics Society
NLTK Natural Language Toolkit
NP noun phrase
NSF National Science Foundation
NP Natural Phonology
OCP Obligatory Contour Principle
OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary
OPOYAZ Society for the Study of Poetic Language
OT Optimality Theory
PCT Phonological CorpusTools
PIC Phase Impenetrability Condition
PISL Plains Indian Sign Language
PM Prosodic Morphology
P&P Principles and Parameters
PSA Preliminaries to Speech Analysis
PyNLPl Python library for Natural Language Processing
RANION The Russian Association of Research Institutes in the Social Sciences
RCD Recursive Constraint Demotion
RcvP Radical CV Phonology
SCC Strict Cycle Condition
SD structural description
SL Strictly Local
SLP-AA Sign Language Phonetic Annotator-Analyzer
SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies
SoL The Signs of Language
SPE The Sound Pattern of English
SPR The Sound Pattern of Russian
SR surface representation
SSC Surface Structure Constraints
   xv
Stratal OT Stratal Optimality Theory

SylTyp Syllable Typology Database
TBUs tone-bearing units
TCRS Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies
TR transitive verb
UG Universal Grammar
UPSID UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database
UR underlying representation
VOT voice onset time
VS Vowel Shift
WALS World Atlas of Language Structures
WCFGs weighted context-free grammars
WEIRD Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic
WLH Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog
The Contributors
Hans Basbøll was Professor of Scandinavian Linguistics at Odense (Southern Denmark) University
1975‒2012. He served as Dean and Prorector and on the Danish Language Council and Research
Council. He is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Austrian
Academy of Sciences (corresponding), and Academia Europaea. He has directed projects in language
acquisition and has published widely in phonology, morphology, and the history of linguistics,
focusing on syllable structure, prosody, interactions between phonology and morphology, and the
acquisition of morphology. His main work is The Phonology of Danish (including prosodic morph-
ology) at Oxford University Press (2005).
Elena Battaner Moro holds a degree in Hispanic Philology (1997) and a PhD in Linguistics (2002)
from the University of Salamanca. She is currently a tenured Associate Professor of General
Linguistics at Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain). Her main lines of research focus on
linguistic historiography and phonology and phonetics, particularly forensic phonetics, Spanish
phonetics, history of phonetics, and Firthian phonology. In these areas, Dr Battaner has authored
or co-authored books, articles, and book chapters, presented invited talks and research papers at
national and international conferences, and served on committees and as a journal reviewer and
editor-in-chief.
Edwin Battistella teaches linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon.
His book Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language was a study of the Prague School
principle of structural asymmetry as developed by Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. In his
later book The Logic of Markedness, Battistella more explicitly developed the connections between
Jakobson’s ideas and those of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, attempting to reconcile structuralist
and generative views. Battistella is the co-editor-in-chief of the Wiley-Blackwell journal Language
and Linguistics Compass, and he contributes a monthly blog to Oxford University Press, called
‘Between the Lines with Edwin Battistella’.
Georges Bohas is Professor Emeritus at École Normale Supérieure, Lyon. He has extensively published
on the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Arabic and other Semitic languages, on the grammatical
tradition of Arabic and Aramaic, and on qur’anic metrics. He is the initiator of the Theory of Matrices
& Etymons. Along with other projects, Bohas is currently working on the eighteenth and final volume
of the Arabic edition of a popular version of the Romance of Baybars.
Andrea Calabrese was born in Campi Salentina in the southeastern tip of Italy. He obtained his PhD
in Linguistics at MIT in 1988 and is currently teaching at the University of Connecticut. His interests
are phonology, morphology, and historical linguistics. He has published more than eighty articles in
books and journals such as Brain and Language, Journal of Neurolinguistics, Isogloss, Linguistic
Inquiry, Morphology, Probus, Rivista di Linguistica, The Linguistic Review. His book, Markedness and
Economy in a Derivational Model of Phonology (Mouton de Gruyter, 2005) proposes a theory
integrating phonological rules and repairs triggered by markedness constraints into a derivational
model of phonology.
Jane Chandlee is an Assistant Professor in the Tri-Co Department of Linguistics at Haverford
College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. After earning her PhD from the University of Delaware in
2014 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Nemours Biomedical Research Center for Pediatric
xviii  
Auditory and Speech Sciences and then a Visiting Assistant Professor in Computer Science at
Haverford before moving into her current position. Her research has appeared in the journals
Linguistic Inquiry, Phonology, Morphology, and the Transactions of the Association for
Computational Linguistics.
Bart de Boer works at the artificial intelligence laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he
investigates the evolution of speech using computer models. His interests are in modelling all aspects
of the evolution of linguistic signals, biological evolution of the anatomy related to speech, and of the
cognitive ability to deal with linguistic signals, as well as cultural evolution of systems of linguistic
signals. He uses population- and agent-based models, machine learning systems, and physical
simulation in his work.
B. Elan Dresher is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. He received his
PhD (Linguistics) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1978. He has published on
phonological theory, learnability, historical linguistics, West Germanic and Biblical Hebrew phon-
ology and prosody, and the history of phonology. His books include Old English and the Theory of
Phonology (1985/2019) and The Contrastive Hierarchy in Phonology (2009). He is the author of ‘The
Phoneme’ in The Blackwell Companion to Phonology (2011) and articles on the history of contrast in
phonology.
San Duanmu is Professor of Linguistics, University of Michigan. He received his PhD in Linguistics
from MIT in 1990 and has held teaching posts at Fudan University, Shanghai (1981‒6), and the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991‒present). His research focuses on general properties of
language, especially those in phonology. He is the author of The Phonology of Standard Chinese (2nd
edition, Oxford University Press, 2007), Syllable Structure: The Limits of Variation (Oxford
University Press, 2008), Foot and Stress (in Chinese, Beijing Language and Culture University
Press, 2016), and A Theory of Phonological Features (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Josef Fruehwald is an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky. He received his PhD from
the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. His research focuses on phonological and phonetic variation
and change, utilizing quantitative and computational methods, and has appeared in journals such as
Language Variation and Change, Annual Review of Linguistics, Language, and Linguistic Variation.
Daniel Currie Hall is an Associate Professor and coordinator of the Program in Linguistics at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Before taking up his current position, he completed a PhD
at the University of Toronto in 2007 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Meertens
Instituut in Amsterdam. His research deals with features and contrasts in phonology and morpho-
syntax, and has appeared in journals such as Linguistic Variation, Glossa, Nordlyd, Lingue e
linguaggio, Phonology, and the Canadian Journal of Linguistics. He is a co-editor of the journal
Phonology and of the OUP volume Contrast and Representations in Syntax.
Kathleen Currie Hall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of
British Columbia. Her research focuses on answering questions in theoretical phonology, especially
about phonological relationships, using techniques from a wide variety of areas, including experi-
mental phonetics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, and information theory. She
and her research team have produced two pieces of open-source software for facilitating phonological
corpus analysis: Phonological CorpusTools and Sign Language Phonetic Annotator-Analyzer.
Jeffrey Heinz is a Professor of Linguistics at Stony Brook University with an appointment in the
Institute for Advanced Computational Science. He conducts research in several related areas
including theoretical and mathematical linguistics and computational learning theory. He obtained
his PhD from UCLA and spent ten years as a professor at the University of Delaware before coming
to Stony Brook. The Linguistic Society of America recognized Heinz with its 2017 Early Career
  xix
Award for his ‘contributions leading to a new computational science of inference and learning as
applied to language’.
Pavel Iosad is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh,
Scotland. Prior to this, he trained at Moscow State University and the University of Tromsø and held
a lectureship at the University of Ulster. His primary interests are in theories of phonological
representation, phonology-morphology and phonology-phonetics interfaces, and historical phon-
ology. He works primarily on the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages.
Adam Jardine is an Assistant Professor in the Rutgers University Department of Linguistics. His
research applies the theory of computation and computational learning theory to problems in
phonological theory. In particular, his work has focused on phonological tone, especially in the
Bantu languages, and how the computational properties of these patterns help us refine our theories
of how humans represent and learn phonology. He received his PhD from the University of Delaware
in 2016.
John E. Joseph is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the University of Edinburgh. His books include
Eloquence and Power (Blackwell, 1987), Limiting the Arbitrary (Benjamins, 2000), From Whitney to
Chomsky (Benjamins, 2002), Language and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Language and
Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), Saussure (Oxford University Press, 2012), and
Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Michael J. Kenstowicz received his PhD in Linguistics (1971) from the University of Illinois where he
was on the faculty until 1990 when he moved to MIT. He is the author of over a hundred research
articles and two widely used phonology textbooks published in 1979 (with Charles W. Kisseberth)
and 1994. His research interests have included tone and accent, cyclic phonology, and more recently
the phonetic basis of phonological contrasts. He has studied the structure of many languages
including Balto-Slavic, Arabic, Bantu, Gur, and East Asian. He has also edited the phonology sections
of NLLT and JEAL for many years.
John Kingston earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. He
taught in the Linguistics Department at the University of Texas, Austin, 1984‒6, and in the
Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Cornell University, 1986‒90. Since 1990, he
has been a member of the faculty of the Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. His research is focused on speech perception and the relationship between phonetics and
phonology. He is also working on documenting languages which belong to the Chatino and
Chinantec families, spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Paul Kiparsky, a native of Finland, received his PhD from MIT in 1965 and taught there until he
joined Stanford’s linguistics department in 1984. He is interested in how words are structured, how
the vocabulary of a language is organized, how the meaning of words determines their syntactic
properties, how language changes and is deployed in verbal art, and what all these things tell us about
the human mind.
Charles W. Kisseberth received his PhD from the University of Illinois in 1969. The most significant
themes of his thesis on Yawelmani phonology concerned the abstractness of phonology and the
problem posed by ‘conspiracies’ for the The Sound Pattern of English conception of derivations.
These themes have remained at the centre of his work for the past fifty years. In the 1970s he began to
concentrate on field work and the description of Bantu languages, with particular focus on tonology.
He began to explore Chimiini and the way that it parses sentences into phrases in 1973, and during
the past ten years has delved ever more deeply into this matter.
xx  
Haruo Kubozono is professor and director at the National Institute for Japanese Language and
Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tokyo. After receiving his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1988
under the supervision of Robert Ladd, he taught phonetics and phonology at Nanzan University,
Osaka University of Foreign Studies and Kobe University before he was appointed at NINJAL in
2010. His current work focuses on word and sentence prosody in Japanese dialects. He recently edited
The Phonetics and Phonology of Geminate Consonants (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Tonal
Change and Neutralization (Mouton Phonology/Phonetics Series, 2018).
D. Robert Ladd studied linguistics as an undergraduate at Brown University in the 1960s and
completed his PhD at Cornell in 1978. After several post-doctoral positions in Europe and North
America he moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1985, where he worked until his retirement in
2011. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. He is best known for his work on
intonation, tone, and related aspects of language (including links to music), and played a central role
in the development of laboratory phonology during the 1990s.
Aditi Lahiri CBE FBA has a DPhil (comparative philology) from the University of Calcutta and a
PhD (linguistics) from Brown University. She was Senior Research Scientist at the Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen (1985–92), and Professor and Chair in General Linguistics,
University of Konstanz (1992–2007). Since 2007, she has been Chair of Linguistics at the University
of Oxford, where she is Director of the Language and Brain Lab and Principal Investigator of the
MORPHON project (Resolving Morpho-Phonological Alternation: Historical, Neurolinguistic, and
Computational Approaches). Her main research interests are in phonology, phonetics, historical
linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics.
Jean Lowenstamm is Professor Emeritus in the Linguistics Department at Université de Paris and a
member of Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (CNRS). He has published articles on the phon-
ology, morphology, and syntax of Semitic, Romance, and Germanic languages. With Jonathan Kaye
and Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Jean Lowenstamm is one of the early contributors to Government
Phonology. Lowenstamm is the founding editor of Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and
Linguistics.
Richard Ogden is Professor of Linguistics at the University of York. His PhD was on Firthian
Prosodic Analysis, a topic on which he has published several papers. He supervises the Firthian
Phonology Archive, a collection of papers, lecture notes, and other personal materials relating to
Firth’s co-workers, held at York. His more recent work explores the organization of phonetic detail in
conversational speech, drawing on many of the ideas in Firthian phonology, but combining conver-
sation analysis, multimodal analysis, and phonetics.
Janet B. Pierrehumbert began her career at MIT and AT&T Bell Labs, with work on the phonetics
and phonology of English intonation. After moving to Northwestern University in 1989, she began
working on how language sound structure is learned, represented in the mind, and used in different
contexts. She joined the University of Oxford in 2015 as the Professor of Language Modelling. She is a
fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the Cognitive Science Society, and is also a member of
the National Academy of Sciences.
Frans Plank was educated at Regensburg, York (England), and Edinburgh. He held academic
positions in Bielefeld, Berlin, Hannover, Aarhus, and was Professor of Linguistics and English
Language at Konstanz from 1983–2017. Since 2014, he has been a Senior Research Fellow of
Somerville College, Oxford. He has mostly published on morphology (inflection and word forma-
tion), syntax, and lately also prosody. Looking at it through the eyes of a practising linguist, he has
found much inspiration in the history of linguistics. A Germanicist by training, his work in typology
  xxi
and historical linguistics has of necessity been wider-ranging. From 1997 to 2017 he was the editor of
Linguistic Typology.
Joanna Radwańska-Williams holds the PhD in Linguistics from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Her dissertation was published as A Paradigm Lost: The Linguistic Theory of Mikołaj
Kruszewski (John Benjamins, 1993). Her interests include intercultural communication, history of
linguistics, language teaching methodology, phonetics, phonology, poetics, semiotics, sociolinguis-
tics, cultural studies, and poetry creative writing. She is a full professor of English at Macao
Polytechnic Institute, in Macao, a Special Administrative Region of China.
Jonathan Rawski is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at San Jose State University. He completed
his PhD in Linguistics (2021) at Stony Brook University, where he was a junior fellow at the Institute
for Advanced Computational Science and a research assistant in the Center for Neural Circuit
Dynamics. He earned a Master’s in Cognitive Science from the Higher School of Economics. His
work concerns the mathematics of language and learning, applied both to human spoken and signed
languages, and to artificial intelligence systems.
Nancy A. Ritter (PhD 1995, New York University) is currently adjunct professor of linguistics at the
University of Connecticut. Her research programme has focused on analysing phonological phe-
nomena from a cognitive view, having published several articles on this topic. Currently, she is
developing an approach to analysing classical ballet applying methods of linguistic analysis and
concepts of cognitive science. Dr Ritter is presently co-editing a Handbook on Vowel Harmony for
Oxford University Press with Harry van der Hulst. She is also Managing and Review Editor for The
Linguistic Review.
Joseph Salmons is the Lester W. J. ‘Smoky’ Seifert Professor in Language Sciences at the University of
Wisconsin—Madison. With Jim Leary, he co-founded the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern
Cultures and edited Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics from 2002 until
2019. He is the author of A History of German: What the Past Reveals about Today’s Language
(Oxford University Press, second edn, 2018) and Sound Change (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
His research focuses on language change and linguistic theory, especially sound systems.
Tobias Scheer is a researcher at the CNRS in France, based in Nice. He is a phonologist with specific
interests in the interfaces (with morphosyntax and phonetics) and related aspects of cognitive
science, more recently also regarding EEG-based experimental work. He mainly works on the
synchrony and diachrony of (Western) Slavic languages and French, and is a representative of
Government Phonology (Strict CV). Among the books he has published are two about the interface
with morphosyntax: A Guide to Interface Theories since Troubetzkoy (published in 2011) and his own
take, Direct Interface (published in 2012).
Ranjan Sen is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, UK. He completed his
DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2009. He is author of Syllable and Segment in Latin (2015;
Oxford University Press) and ‘Reconstructing Phonological Change: Duration and Syllable Structure
in Latin Vowel Reduction’ (2012; Phonology), and co-editor of the 2020 Special Issue of English
Language & Linguistics, ‘Studies in Late Modern English Historical Phonology using the Eighteenth-
Century English Phonology Database (ECEP)’.
Michael Silverstein was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology,
Linguistics, and Psychology, and Director of the Center for the Study of Communication and
Society at the University of Chicago. After completing his PhD in Linguistics at Harvard
University (1972), he held Guggenheim (1978) and MacArthur Prize (1982) Fellowships, as well as
resident fellowships and visiting faculty appointments in the US, Australia, Europe, and Japan.
Silverstein’s research, writing, and teaching ranged across language structure and function, the
xxii  
anthropology of language use, sociolinguistics, semiotics, language and cognition, language ideology,
language history and prehistory, and the history of the social sciences.
Richard Sproat received his PhD in Linguistics from MIT in 1985. He has worked at AT&T Bell
Laboratories, the University of Illinois, Oregon Health & Science University, and finally at Google,
where he is currently a Research Scientist at Google Japan. Sproat has worked in various areas
including syntax, morphology, computational morphology, articulatory and acoustic phonetics, text-
to-speech synthesis, and text-to-scene conversion. At Google he works on applying Deep Learning to
problems in text processing. He also has a long-standing interest in writing systems and symbol
systems more generally.
Jørgen Staun is associate professor of English at Copenhagen University. His research interests
include theoretical phonology, including the structure and history of English, and topics in socio-
linguistics and functional case-based syntax. In addition to publications reporting on his research, he
is the author of An Introduction to the Pronunciation of North American English (University Press of
Southern Denmark, 2011).
Harry van der Hulst (PhD 1984, University of Leiden, the Netherlands) specializes in phonology. He
has published four books and over 170 articles; he has edited over thirty-two books and six journal
theme issues. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the The Linguistic Review since 1990 and he is co-editor
of the series ‘Studies in Generative Grammar’ (Mouton de Gruyter). He is currently (since 2000)
Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. His most recent books are Asymmetries in
Vowel Harmony: A Representational Account (2018, Oxford University Press) and Principles of
Radical CV Phonology: A Theory of Segmental and Syllabic Structure (2020, Edinburgh University
Press).
Marc van Oostendorp is a Professor of Dutch at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures
of Radboud University and a Head of the Variational Linguistics Department of the Meertens
Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He started on a PhD in phonology
in 1991, changed its theoretical framework to OT in 1993, and finished in 1995.
1
Introduction
Leading ideas in phonology
B. Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst
The aim of this volume is to provide an up-to-date history of phonology, written by

phonologists, from the earliest examples of phonological thinking that we can reconstruct
through the rise of phonology as a field in the twentieth century and up to the present time.
We believe that this volume is particularly timely in the current period when phonological
theory has been developing in different directions that appear to lack a common set of core
ideas. An exploration of the history of phonology from various viewpoints could provide
some much needed perspective on where phonology has been, and throw some light on
where it is going. While the various chapters inevitably devote attention to the diversity
and unique aspects of individual theories and schools of thought, they also demonstrate the
continuity of fundamental ideas that have shaped the history of phonology. We believe it is
important, as in any field of science, to study the development of the ideas and theories that
inform the current state of our field. We hope that this volume will stimulate further work
in what has been a relatively understudied area.
1.1 Previous histories of phonology
There have been several works that discuss central concepts, different schools, and the
historical development of phonological thinking. In the past half-century, some authors
have surveyed the rise of such central notions as the phoneme (Jones 1967; Krámský 1974),
neutralization (Davidsen-Nielsen 1978; Akamatsu 1988), and morphophonemics (Kilbury
1976). Dinnsen (1979), with chapters written by different authors, is a review of alternative
approaches in the early generative era. Two comprehensive histories of phonology from the
late nineteenth century to the last quarter of the twentieth century are Fischer-Jørgensen
(1975) and Anderson (1985). Fischer-Jørgensen devotes separate chapters to theories and
schools up to and including early generative phonology, with a special interest in how the
theories compare with respect to a number of issues. Anderson (1985) presents theories and
schools in the light of how they dealt with representations and rules (derivations). Goldsmith
& Laks (2019), both phonologists, offer an ambitious account of developments in linguistic
theory with a focus on phonology, placing them in the broader context, as they argue one
must, of psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. All these publications are of great value,
deserving a prominent place in a bibliography of the history of phonology.
In addition to the publications mentioned, there are chapters about phonology in single-
authored books on the history of linguistics (e.g. Robins 1967) or in handbooks of the
B. Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst, Introduction: Leading ideas in phonology In: The Oxford History of Phonology.
Edited by: B. Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst, Oxford University Press. © B. Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796800.003.0001
2 .       
history of linguistics (van der Hulst 2013) or of specific subareas of phonology (Murray
2015a). The Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology (Honeybone & Salmons 2015) has
many chapters that deal in whole or in part with topics in the history of phonology. Also,
many other articles in journals or chapters in single-authored or edited volumes on phon-
ology devote partial or extensive attention to the historical development of specific aspects of
phonology, such as typology (van der Hulst 2017), constraints (Lacharité & Paradis 1993;
van der Hulst 2011), contrast (Dresher 2015, 2016), or specific theories, especially generative
phonology (van der Hulst 2004; Scheer 2011b). Notable in this regard is issue 34(1‒2) of
Folia Linguistica Historica devoted to the history of phonology (with an introduction by
Goldsmith & Laks 2000a). In fact, it is fair to say that during the last twenty years or so there
has been an increased interest in the history of our field, which is why we believe that it is
time to capture the insights that have been gained in a single multi-authored volume.
1.2 Plan of the volume
The volume is divided into five parts. Part I, Early insights in phonology, begins with
writing systems, for reasons we elaborate on in the next section, and has chapters devoted
to traditions of phonological thought that go back to antiquity: the Sanskrit tradition of
:
Pānini; the East Asian traditions (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean); the medieval Arabic
grammatical tradition; and the Greco-Roman tradition. These great intellectual traditions
form the foundation of later thinking, and continue to enrich phonological theory to this
day. We conclude Part I with two chapters that form a bridge to modern phonology: one
on theories of phonological phrasing from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and
one on the contributions to phonology of nineteenth-century historical linguistics.
Part II takes up what we call The founders of phonology, the important schools and
individuals of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries who shaped
phonology as an organized scientific field. These chapters are arranged in roughly chrono-
logical order, and discuss the Kazan School, Saussure, the Prague School, the London
School, and the American schools associated with Boas, Sapir, and Bloomfield. We
conclude this section with a chapter on the pioneers of sign language phonology, an
important strand in the tapestry of phonological thought.
Part III continues with Mid-twentieth-century developments in phonology. The first
three chapters discuss phonology in the Soviet Union, Northern and Western Europe, and
North America, respectively. These are followed by a chapter on developments leading up
to generative grammar. The section culminates in a chapter on Chomsky and Halle’s The
Sound Pattern of English (SPE). While there have been other very influential and founda-
tional publications in the history of phonology, in our history SPE is a major landmark that
closes one era and begins another.
Part IV is therefore titled Phonology after SPE, reflecting our view that subsequent
phonological theory had to respond in one way or another to that work, either taking it
further or reacting against it. The first three chapters in this section—on derivations,
representations, and phonology-morphosyntax interaction—discuss developments that
were considered to be extensions of the SPE theory, even when they departed, sometimes
radically, from it. The next two chapters discuss two theories, Dependency Phonology and
Government Phonology, that came to be perceived as competitors to mainstream
:     3
generative phonology. Constraint-and-repair approaches to phonology, which put an

emphasis on constraints in addition to rules, were overshadowed by Optimality Theory,
which posited that constraint ranking is the sole mechanism, and which took over SPE’s
role as the lingua franca of phonological theory, notwithstanding the existence of compet-
ing traditions. This part ends with a chapter on the study of variation, which has had a
complex relation to generative grammar, and which forms a bridge to the final part.
Part V, New methods and approaches, is not organized by theoretical school, but rather
takes up methods and approaches that became more prominent in the latter part of the
twentieth century and have continued to be so in the twenty-first. The section begins with a
review of attempts to provide phonetic explanations for phonological phenomena, a
project that dates back to the beginnings of phonology but which takes on new forms in
this period. The other chapters in this part deal with areas that rely on the development of
computer technology, large databases and corpora, and sophisticated statistical techniques:
these are the chapters on corpora and phonological analysis, probabilistic phonology, the
computational modelling of phonology, and models of phonological learning. The volume
concludes with a chapter on the evolution of phonology.
In the rest of this chapter we will discuss how the leading ideas that characterize
contemporary phonology emerged and developed in the history of our field, with reference
to the individual chapters. We refer to them using the authors’ surnames in  .
1.3 Leading ideas in phonology
1.3.1 Part I: Early insights in phonology
The central insight that distinguishes a phonological approach to the expression side of
language from phonetics is that sounds that are different can count as the same at some
level of linguistic analysis, and, hence by inference, in the minds of language users. This
insight has been called the phonemic principle (Swadesh 1934; van der Hulst 2013), and the
first explicit statements of this insight in the nineteenth century are usually taken to mark
the birth of phonology as a field.¹ However, the idea is much older, and is to some degree
implicit in the invention of writing systems. According to S (Chapter 2), ‘all full
writing systems . . . must represent sound even if very imperfectly, and thus the history of
phonology really begins with the history of writing.’ No phonographic writing system is
designed to capture the full array of phonetic properties of words or whole utterances.
A system that is limited to a finite set of symbols that has to be applied in a broadly
consistent way will naturally tend to choose symbols that, however imperfectly, represent
phonologically contrastive units, and thus manifests an implicit version of the phonemic
principle.
While the thinking that went into the invention of the earliest writing systems is lost to
us, we have records of several ancient traditions of phonological analysis of considerable
¹ Swadesh (1934) formulates the phonemic principle as follows: ‘The phonemic principle is that there are in
each language a limited number of elemental types of speech sounds, called phonemes, peculiar to that language;
that all sounds produced in the employment of the given language are referable to its set of phonemes; that only its
own phonemes are at all significant in the given language.’
4 .       
:
sophistication. K (Chapter 3) writes that Pānini’s grammatical analysis of Sanskrit
(approximately 500 ?) ‘is the most complete generative grammar of any language yet
written, and a source of many of the key ideas in Western linguistics in the last two
centuries’. Therefore, the history that this book covers begins at its highest point, with a
work that has never been surpassed. The Sanskrit tradition distinguished phonetic trea-
tises, which were meant to encode the pronunciation of the Vedic texts and which
classified sounds by a unified set of phonetic categories, from phonological analysis; the
latter referred to phonetic categories, but imposed its own classification of them based on
the way sounds pattern in the phonology. With its emphasis on empirical coverage and
economy of statement, Pānini’s: grammar remains an inspiration and source of phono-
logical ideas to this day.
D & K (Chapter 4) discuss phonological issues that have concerned
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean linguists from ancient times to the present day. They
observe that, though it may seem paradoxical, the very poor representation of phonology
in Chinese orthography did not hinder phonological research, but rather encouraged its
early flourishing, ‘precisely owing to the need to annotate pronunciation, however arduous
the task’. In the first millennium  Chinese linguists collected and catalogued regional
speech; rhyming books began to appear in the first millennium , and started a tradition
of organizing syllables according to similarities in their constituents and tones. The earliest
records of studies on Japanese sound structure are of a more recent date. Documents and
dictionaries compiled by Buddhist scholars (of which the most famous date from around
1100 ) include tonal descriptions that are valuable sources of data for the study of the
development of pitch accent systems in varieties of Japanese. The theoretical concept of the
mora is closely related to the katakana and hiragana syllabaries (both based on Chinese
characters). The primary focus of the Korean section is the remarkable Hangul writing
system, designed in 1446. Invented de novo under the influence of Sanskrit Devanāgarī
script, it symbolizes the articulation of sounds in a systematic manner.
B & L (Chapter 5) discuss the rich tradition of grammatical analysis
that developed in the Arab world from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. Their focus is
the tas: rīf, the grammatical component which hosts phonology. They argue that the Arab
grammarians’ analysis of the morphology and phonology of the verbal system of Classical
Arabic can be recast in strikingly contemporary terms. Starting with the root-and-pattern
morphological structure of Arabic, which provided the ‘underlying’ representations, the
Arab grammarians took a derivational approach to word formation and inflection, with
phonological operations interleaved, eventually arriving at representations of the surface
:
realization of forms. Like Pānini, they paid attention to detail, applying rigorous, formal
analysis to achieve comprehensive coverage of the language data in ways that anticipated
fundamental insights of modern linguistic theories.
According to S (Chapter 6), ‘The most important legacy of the Greco-Roman trad-
ition is the appreciation of language science as an independent discipline requiring its own
terminology, principles, and techniques’. He details how the Greco-Roman tradition,
which paid attention to both literary language and vernaculars, and combined practical
grammar writing with scientific analysis, formed the basis of medieval and later linguistics
in Europe and further east, with its early recognition of practically every grammatical
distinction that has persisted throughout linguistic history into modern times. Though
writings on phonology were not typically separated from articulation, orthography,
:     5
metrics, and morphology, they show awareness of natural classes of sounds and what
would later be called allophonic variation—the fact that certain ‘letters’ (i.e. sounds) have
different values in different positions. Other contributions of the ancient Western gram-
marians include studies of accentuation, syllable structure and weight, phonological
processes, morphophonological alternations, and abstract underlying bases.
L & P (Chapter 7) trace the history of the scholarly study of prosodic
grouping. They first review Joshua Steel’s 1775/9 account of the melodic and rhythmic
structure of English speech, which starts a tradition continued in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries by Henry Sweet in England and Eduard Sievers and Franz Saran
in Germany. While differing in terminology and the number of domains they distinguish,
all share the recognition of what later came to be known, after the British phonetician
David Abercrombie, as the ‘Abercrombian foot’, which consists of a stressed syllable
followed by unstressed syllables up to the next stressed syllable. They contrast this
tradition, which sees prosodic structure as largely independent from syntactic structure
and being driven by rhythmic factors, with the later-twentieth-century approach in which
phonological structure above the word reflects the surface syntactic structure, albeit one
that can be modified by rhythmic factors.
S (Chapter 8) surveys selected nineteenth-century developments in historical
and comparative linguistics as they helped foreshadow or lay the foundations for major
strands of modern phonological theory. He writes that when we consider ‘contemporary
theorizing about abstract structures of speech sounds, the echoes of the 19th century are
loud and constant’. He shows how nineteenth-century historical linguistic scholarship led
to crucial insights and initiated debates that have endured to the present. Topics given
special consideration are the relation between phonetics and phonology, the notions of
system and contrast, representations and abstractness, and how to account for regularity
and variation.
1.3.2 Part II: The founders of phonology
As impressive as the achievements of the early traditions in Part I are, they each worked on
one language, or group of dialects, and did not aim at a universal theory of phonology. The
nineteenth century saw a transition to a search for universal principles of sound change,
and this emphasis on general principles came to characterize the various schools that we
call the founders of phonology. Whereas the traditions in Part I developed independently
of one another, the schools in Part II all built on the foundations of nineteenth-century
historical linguistics, and shared certain basic concepts.
R́-W (Chapter 9) shows how much of what we consider to be
modern phonology is prefigured in the works of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845‒
1929) and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski (1851‒87), the key members of the Kazan
Linguistic Circle. Kruszewski’s brief monograph On Sound Alternation (1881) offers an
astonishingly insightful and explicit discussion of issues that have continued to be central
in phonological theories and debates—in particular, the question as to whether and how
different kinds of phonological generalization need to be distinguished. In An Attempt at a
Theory of Phonetic Alternations (1895), Baudouin further developed the classification of
alternations, and redefined the phoneme as ‘the psychological equivalent of a speech
6 .       
sound’. As the author states, Baudouin and Kruszewski’s theorizing about the relationship
between synchrony and diachrony and between phonetics, phonology, and morphology
was ‘the Kazan School’s enduring influence and inspiration for the subsequent worldwide
development of phonology’.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a founder of the modern orientation in
linguistic theory, which focuses on the analysis of language as a synchronic system of
contrasting units. J (Chapter 10) shows how he influenced modern phonology, first
with his Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages (1879),
and, more widely with his posthumous Course in General Linguistics (1916). Both of these
works undertake to analyse a language as a synchronic system: the earlier one by recon-
structing parts of the sound system of Proto-Indo-European, and the later one extending
its scope to languages generally. The chapter traces Saussure’s phonological thinking and
discusses certain widespread misunderstandings of his work. While the historical linguists
realized that individual sounds form part of a system, it was Saussure who put the system
first. He thereby laid the ground for ‘structural linguistics’ which has characterized all
major theories of phonology to the present day, and ultimately for structuralism as an
intellectual movement beyond linguistics which has influenced sociology, anthropology,
and other disciplines that study human cognition and behaviour.
From our current perspective, the Prague School, discussed by B
(Chapter 11), was the most influential in setting the future course of phonological theory.
The primary representatives of this school, Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890–1938) and Roman
Jakobson (1896–1982), drew on the work of Baudouin, Kruszewski, and Saussure to
address the nature of phonological elements, alternations, and the structure of phono-
logical systems. Their debut at the First International Congress of Linguists in 1928 in The
Hague marked an important milestone in the evolution of the concept of the phoneme and
of phonological structure. The Prague School was characterized by the pursuit of scientific
rigor and the quest for a general theory of language. Its writings promoted and developed a
‘functional’ perspective which views sounds as elements of a functional system of opposi-
tions (contrasts). Trubetzkoy’s Principles of Phonology (1939) is a highlight of twentieth-
century phonology and the point of departure for later work.
As described by B M & O (Chapter 12), the British linguist John
R. Firth (1890–1960) developed a unique functionalist approach to language and linguis-
tics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, from 1937 to his death.
The ‘London School’ refers to the group of Firth’s colleagues and disciples at SOAS who
developed Firthian Prosodic Analysis (FPA) on the basis of Firth’s thinking.
A characteristic of this approach that was unique at the time was the separation of
properties of the sound stream that extend over multiple phonological units. The identi-
fication of these ‘prosodies’ broke with strict segmentalism, that is, the absolute vertical
slicing of the speech signal into linearly sequenced segments. This idea re-emerged later in
American linguistics in various guises, notably in Autosegmental Phonology. Another
distinguishing property of FPA is that it is polysystemic: ‘that is, it establishes multiple
systems of contrast which hold at different places in phonological structure, and does not
assert any necessary identity of elements in different systems.’ For example, consonants in
syllable-initial and syllable-final positions can belong to different systems if they show
different patterns of contrast. This idea also lives on, for example in Dependency Theory.
Another contribution of this school was its attention to African and Asian languages.
:     7
S (Chapter 13) describes how phonological theory in North America was
reoriented from a historical to a synchronic structural perspective by three great figures:
Franz Boas (1858–1942), Edward Sapir (1884–1939), and Leonard Bloomfield
(1887–1949). Though all had training in philologically-based comparative Germanics, all
three specialized in fieldwork on the ‘exotic’ languages of North America. Countering
evolutionary and racist notions that languages of so-called primitive peoples had no fixed
sounds, Boas demonstrated that every language has a phonological system of categories of
sound. Silverstein observes that the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911),
‘organized by Boas to illustrate the wide typological diversity of the continent’s indigenous
languages, was as well a major enterprise for recruiting scholars to fieldwork-based
empirical investigation of typologically interesting languages.’ Sapir was ‘the awe-inspiring
20th-century virtuoso of anthropological linguistic fieldwork’. As summed up in his
ground-breaking article, Sound Patterns in Language (1925), Sapir’s detailed accounts of
Takelma and Southern Paiute contained fundamental insights into the importance of
studying sounds as points in a pattern, and of an ‘emic’, as opposed to an ‘etic’, perspective.
Bloomfield systematized and codified descriptive phonological theory, and became ‘an
authoritative voice in the new empirical descriptivism, the most significant apical figure in
American linguistic theory until Noam Chomsky’.²
The chapter by   H (Chapter 14) on the (early) history of sign language
phonology covers a development which stands largely apart from the other chapters in this
volume; nevertheless, it has come to be recognized that the study of sign language expands
our view of what phonology is about. An early pioneer was Roch-Ambroise Auguste
Bébian (1825), who developed a notational system which allows signs to be segmented
into smaller, meaningless parts. In the twentieth century, La Mont West (1960) and
William Stokoe (1960) applied structuralist linguistic methods of analysis to sign language.
Stokoe’s seminal work, inspired by Trager & Smith (1951), is commonly acknowledged as
the first publication to claim that signs can be analysed into meaningless simultaneously
organized elements; West’s unpublished dissertation, in many ways ahead of its time,
remains little known, unfortunately. The work of Ursula Bellugi & Edward Klima (1973)
subsequently added much to bring sign language to the attention of linguists. Van der
Hulst then reviews the impact on sign phonology of the transition from American
structuralist linguistics to generative approaches. Sign phonology entered a new era with
the rise of sequential structure and various strands of research that broke with Stokoe’s
conception of the sign as a simultaneous bundle of properties. By showing that spoken and
signed languages share design properties in their phonology that are independent of the
phonetics of each modality, these researchers have enlarged our conception of phonology
and merit a place among its founders.
1.3.3 Part III: Mid-twentieth-century developments in phonology
The chapters in Part III show how the various kinds of structural phonology discussed in
Part II developed in particular directions in the Soviet Union, Europe, and North America
² Sadly, Michael Silverstein died while this volume was still in preparation. Please see the editors’ note at the
end of his chapter.
8 .       
in the mid-twentieth century. Despite their common interest in universal principles, each
school was influenced by the particular languages their proponents worked on, as was the
case with the traditions discussed in Part I.
I (Chapter 15) considers the development of phonological theory in the Soviet
Union, both within the context of its origins in the intellectual atmosphere of late-
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century linguistics in Russia, and in the light of its
later separation into two different frameworks, known as the ‘Moscow’ and ‘Leningrad’
(St Petersburg) schools. The former originated with Filipp Fortunatov (1848–1914) and
emphasized a ‘formalist’ approach; the Leningrad phonologists were heirs, at least rhet-
orically, to the ‘psychological’ approach of Baudouin. Nevertheless, Iosad writes that
‘phonology in the Soviet Union can be seen as a coherent, independent sibling of the
better known European and American varieties of structuralism’, notably the Prague
School, and both schools share important similarities in how they address issues of
phonological analysis. It is demonstrated that many of the analytical choices and contro-
versies were shaped in a significant way by the properties of the phonological grammar of
Russian, with which both schools were preoccupied.
Bø (Chapter 16) focuses on the phonological implications of the general theory of
language, called Glossematics, forged by the Danish linguists Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965)
and Hans Jørgen Uldall (1907–57). ‘Glossematics takes as its point of departure the dual
nature of all things linguistic’: the parallel structure of the expression plane and the content
plane. Glossematics emphasized paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations rather than phonetic
analysis, and this led to an interest in scrutinizing phonotactics and prosody in systematic and
original ways, areas to which scholars from the glossematic milieu contributed important
studies. The approach was influenced by the properties of Danish, in particular the Danish
stød, ‘the central crux in Danish phonology, morphophonology, and prosodic morphology’.
There are certain affinities with the theory of Firth, who appears to have been influenced by
the early writings of Hjelmslev and Uldall. The chapter further describes the impact of
Glossematics on the strong Danish tradition of structuralist dialect descriptions and on
phonological descriptions of French, where André Martinet (1908–99) played a key role.
As described by L (Chapter 17), from the early 1940s to the early 1960s American
phonology, led by Bernard Bloch (1907–65), George Trager (1906–92), and Charles
Hockett (1916–2000), was remarkably monolithic, notwithstanding the important hetero-
dox work of scholars such as Kenneth Pike (1912–2000) and Zellig Harris (1909‒92). Its
practitioners (the ‘post-Bloomfieldians’) nominally followed Bloomfield, but in practice
departed from his views in several respects. First, contrary to Bloomfield’s explicit view,
they assumed the reality of a narrow phonetic transcription (what Chomsky would later
call ‘systematic phonetics’). Second, they accepted a strong version of what Hockett called
‘duality of patterning’ (similar in spirit if not to the letter of Hjemslev’s duality perspective),
according to which individual utterances are simultaneously arrangements of phonemes
and arrangements of meaningful units. This led to their insistence—contrary to
Bloomfield’s practice—that phonemic analysis had to be carried out without ‘mixing
levels’; that is, without any reference to grammatical and lexical categories. Separation of
levels in turn led to the requirement of a ‘biunique’ relation between phonemes and
allophones. Though these principles made it difficult to deal with morphophonological
regularities, ‘The architects of the theory did not regard these consequences as flaws’ but ‘as
evidence of the insight afforded by rigorous adherence to the logic of the theory’.
:     9
As in many other fields, the United States became the centre of gravity of linguistic
theory following the Second World War, partly due to the movement of scientists from
Europe to America. D & H (Chapter 18) discuss key figures in the 1950s and
1960s whose work led to the theory of generative phonology. They show how generative
phonology developed in part from the collaboration of Roman Jakobson and his student
Morris Halle, continuing the Prague School approach by elaborating and modifying earlier
ideas concerning distinctive features and relating them to mathematical models from the
then-new field of information theory. Another source was the formalization of American
structuralist phonology by Zellig Harris and the critique of that theory by his student,
Noam Chomsky. These sources merged in the collaboration of Chomsky and Halle and
their critiques of prevailing notions of what they called the ‘taxonomic’ phoneme and the
strict separation of levels. The emerging synthesis both built on and diverged from earlier
ideas. According to Dresher & Hall, ‘What was novel about Chomsky and Halle’s critique
was that they took issue with the scientific and psychological assumptions that under-
pinned taxonomic phonemics’ and proposed to replace the modest procedural goals of
phonological theory by more ambitious scientific goals.
Part III concludes with a chapter devoted to Chomsky & Halle’s SPE (1968).
K (Chapter 19) writes that it is ‘the first detailed exposition of the generative
model of phonology and linguistics. With its reliance on ordered rewrite rules, it is no
exaggeration to say that SPE revolutionized the field of phonology’. The key innovation in
this landmark study was to treat phonology as the realizational component of a generative
grammar that aims to characterize the tacit knowledge of an idealized native speaker in
terms of a system of ordered rules defined over sound sequences represented as distinctive
feature matrices. The chapter reviews SPE’s analysis of English word stress and morpho-
phonological vowel alternations as well as the general distinctive feature system it employs.
A theory of markedness, designed to take account of the intrinsic content of the features, is
introduced towards the end of SPE to remedy what Chomsky and Halle characterize as the
‘overly formal’ approach of the rest of the book. Kenstowicz concludes with a consideration
of the special climate that nurtured the development of the generative approach and the
contributions of Chomsky and Halle’s first generation of students.
1.3.4 Part IV: Phonology after SPE
The first set of issues that arose following the publication of SPE concerned phonological
derivations, perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the SPE theory. Though it had
precedents in the morphophonology of American structuralists (not to mention the
:
work of Pānini and the medieval Arab grammarians), making the derivation the main
mechanism of the theory distinguished generative phonology from other contemporary
approaches. K & K (Chapter 20) frame their discussion in terms of a
series of questions: Can any limitations be placed on the disparity between the underlying
and surface phonetic representations? Should phonological rules be distinguished in terms
of phonetic versus morphological function and motivation? How do rules interact (what
sort of rule orders are permitted), and what kinds of information do they have access to?
Is there a role for output targets? In addition to ordered rewrite rules, should the grammar
include characterizations of the inventory of elements and structures at underlying,
10 .       
intermediate, or surface structure? If so, what is the relation between the rewrite rules and
these structures? The abstractness controversy (first raised by Paul Kiparsky’s 1968 paper
‘How Abstract is Phonology?’) and other debates in phonological theory turned on these
questions; new answers to them gave rise to the theories of Natural Phonology (Stampe
1972; Donegan & Stampe 1979), Natural Generative Phonology (Vennemann 1974a, b;
Hooper 1976a), and later, Lexical Phonology and Morphology (Kiparsky 1982a, b, 1985),
and contained the seeds of constraint-based theories that came to the fore in the following
decades. The authors observe that these issues continue to be revisited in the light of new
methods and theoretical orientations.
While SPE was a sharp departure from American structuralism in some respects,
notably in the centrality of derivations, K (Chapter 21) writes that it carried
over the earlier American structuralist notion that phonological representations consist of
linear sequences of distinctive features divided by boundaries. During the 1970s and 1980s,
attention turned from derivational to representational issues: ‘The earlier preoccupation
with the form of rules and how these rules derived the correct surface forms from input
forms was almost entirely superseded by proposing representations that allowed (as much
as possible) for universal principles to interact with these representations to yield outputs’.
Phonological representations were radically reimagined as complex multi-linear, (par-
tially) independent, (sometimes) hierarchically arranged structures. Autosegmental
Phonology (Goldsmith 1976a), originally proposed to account for the special properties
of tone, provided a conceptual framework that was extended to the representation of
syllables, stress, distinctive features, and the internal phonological structure of words and
sentences. A number of these proposals, which did not find a place in the SPE theory, had
been prefigured by earlier non-generative theories.
Broadly speaking, derivations and representations are the two ways for morphosyntax to
bear on phonology, and the tension between these types of accounts is explored by S
(Chapter 22) in his chapter on the impact of morphosyntactic information on phonology
in generative theories. The derivational path was introduced by Chomsky et al. (1956) and
was successively known as the transformational cycle, the phonological cycle, cyclic
derivation, and, more recently, as derivation by phase. Representational accounts insert
objects into the linear string that is submitted to phonological computation: juncture
phonemes in their earliest incarnation, then boundary symbols in SPE, then prosodic
domains in the early 1980s. Since that time, the two channels have been associated with
specific theories: Lexical Phonology and Morphology and its Optimality Theoretic des-
cendants on the derivational side, and Prosodic Phonology (Selkirk [1978] 1981; Nespor &
Vogel 1986) on the representational side. Another major issue is whether the phonology
can refer directly to morphosyntactic information, or whether such information is invisible
to the phonology and must be translated into phonological vocabulary before the phon-
ology can refer to it. The chapter traces the complex history of these approaches in
generative phonology.
Several theories that reacted to SPE emphasized the representational side of phonology.
One that anticipated some generative-internal developments is Dependency Phonology
(DP; Anderson & Jones [1972] 1974, 1977; Anderson & Ewen 1987). S (Chapter 23)
observes that because the founders and principal followers of DP are based in Britain, the
Netherlands, France, and Denmark, DP ‘is strongly rooted in a European tradition of
linguistics, in particular indebted not only to the work of Firth (1948a), Abercrombie
:     11
(1967), and Catford (1977), but also to the work of the proponents of Glossematics
(Hjelmslev 1943)’. Dependency Phonology extends the dependency formalism originally
used to account for syntactic structure to segmental internal structure, syllables, and larger
suprasegmental structures. It proposes an alternative interpretation of the internal struc-
ture of phonological segments, replacing binary features with a restricted number of
monovalent primes.
Arising in the 1980s, Government Phonology (GP) also minimizes the derivational
aspect of phonology in favour of enriched representations. R (Chapter 24) writes that
GP tried to restore the parallelism between phonology and syntax that existed in the early
days of generative grammar in order to yield a unified cognitive approach to both
components; under the influence of the Government-Binding syntax of the time
(Chomsky 1981), GP proposed a system of fixed principles in conjunction with
language-specific parameters, which together operate on representations in terms of
minimal computation. GP rejected phonological rules, rule ordering, and binary features
in favour of a small inventory of unary elements which could enter into dependency
relations (similar to those of Dependency Phonology). The chapter shows that as the
theory evolved, it departed further from other contemporary approaches to phonology, for
example in the replacement of the syllable constituent by pairs of onset-rhyme sequences
and doing away with the machinery of resyllabification, the revocation of a division
between phonological and phonetic representations, and the elimination of constraints
that are grounded in phonetics or physical properties, or more generally in functional
motives of perception and production.
C (Chapter 25) begins his chapter on constraint-and-repair theories by
observing that a phonological rule—the main formal device of the SPE theory—can be
decomposed into two parts: a configuration that needs to be changed (the structural
description) and a prescription as to what to do to it (the structural change). These two
parts can be separated: the structural description can be reformulated as a negative
constraint that states that a certain configuration is illicit, without prescribing how to fix
or remove it. A further operation—a repair—is used to do that. Constraints, in the form of
morpheme structure conditions, were already present in the SPE model, but starting in the
1980s, a series of papers by Rajendra Singh, Carole Paradis, and Andrea Calabrese
proposed versions of theories that put output constraints and repair rules at the centre
of phonological theory. The theories differed in how the repairs are implemented: for Singh
and Paradis, by universal automatic processes (reminiscent of Natural Phonology); for
Calabrese, by rules, which are retained and work together with constraints. All these
models are derivational, transforming an underlying representation into a surface repre-
sentation by steps, as in classical generative phonology.
A theme that recurs in all the chapters in this section is dissatisfaction with the SPE
focus on rules, or derivations, or both. Both rules and derivations were rejected in
spectacular fashion in Alan Prince & Paul Smolensky’s (1993) Optimality Theory:
Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. V O (Chapter 26) writes
that Optimality Theory (OT) became immensely popular very quickly, and represented the
greatest revolution in phonological theory since SPE, supplanting it as the new phono-
logical lingua franca. In place of an underlying form undergoing a series of ordered rules in
a step-by-step derivation, Prince & Smolensky posited that all possible outputs for a given
input are evaluated in parallel against a set of universal constraints. In a departure from
12 .       
most previous theories that incorporated constraints, OT constraints can conflict and are
thus violable; which constraints prevail is determined by language-specific ranking of the
constraints. Like the SPE theory, OT has given rise to many variations, including Stratal
OT, Harmonic Serialism, and a number of stochastic versions that aim to account for
variation. Van Oostendorp concludes that some feel that OT is losing the position it has
held for the past twenty-five years as the dominant framework of phonology, as basic issues
about ‘what the stuff of phonology really is’ continue to be contentious; however, no
successor has become apparent in a field that is becoming increasingly diverse.
The final chapter in this section takes us back to the origins of generative phonology
and, earlier than that, to the early-twentieth-century split between diachronic and syn-
chronic phonology. F (Chapter 27) writes that the study of phonological
variation ‘has followed a largely parallel history to the development of generative phon-
ology’. Like generative phonology, contemporary variationist research can be said to date
to 1968, to Uriel Weinreich, William Labov, & Marvin I. Herzog’s seminal article,
‘Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change’. With its roots in dialect
study and debates within historical linguistics, this article brings us back full circle to the
study of language change and how it connects to the synchronic state of the language.
Contrary to SPE, which abstracts away from variation and takes the idiolect of an idealized
native speaker as its object, Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog argue that language is a social
object characterized by orderly heterogeneity. How this variation should be accounted for,
and the status of variable rules and their relation to mainstream phonology, have been
matters of considerable debate. Nevertheless, Labov’s demonstration that phonological
change can be studied in real time has given rise to a major research enterprise that has
developed at times in opposition to and at times in concert with the research programme of
generative phonology.
1.3.5 Part V: New methods and approaches
The methods and approaches in this section are not actually ‘new’; some have a fairly
lengthy history. However, they have taken on new forms due to their reliance on devel-
opments in fields such as computer technology, computational modelling, and statistical
analysis. The first chapter in Part V reviews the history of phonetic explanations of
phonological patterns from the 1920s to the present. K (Chapter 28) starts with
the observation that ‘The phonological content of spoken messages is conveyed phonet-
ically from the speaker to the listener, which suggests that phonological patterns may be
explained phonetically’. Nevertheless, he concludes, ‘There is no consensus in the field
regarding the proper relationship between phonology and phonetics, and thus no consen-
sus regarding whether and how phonological patterns can be explained phonetically.’ His
chapter takes us through the changing relationship between phonetics and phonology,
starting with the 1920s–40s, when phonologists attempting to define the phoneme empha-
sized the independence of phonology from phonetics. In the second half of the twentieth
century distinctive features came to the fore, which raised new questions about this relation
that remain unresolved: To what extent are phonological features grounded in phonetics?
Are the correlates of features primarily acoustic or articulatory? More generally, how much
of phonology can be explained by phonetic principles? The tension between the
:     13
substantive and formal aspects of speech sounds has been a fundamental theme in the
history of phonology.
In her chapter on corpora and phonological analysis, H (Chapter 29) observes that
there are many different definitions of ‘corpus phonology’. In the widest sense, a corpus
can be defined as any collection of linguistic data; in this sense, all empirical phonology
:
from Pānini on has drawn on some sort of corpus, however strictly delimited. More
commonly, the term is associated with work that involves answering a research question
using pre-existing data of an appropriate type: depending on how strict the criteria are for
establishing a corpus, corpus phonology can become a research paradigm in opposition to
other approaches to phonology. Hall writes, ‘The critical view that Chomsky and other
generativists took towards corpora helps explain the feeling of novelty of corpus linguistics’
in the 1980s. Advances in computational storage capacity, processing power, and analytical
tools have all contributed to the feasibility of corpus linguistics; the availability of large,
accessible corpora of naturalistic data facilitate investigations of frequency and probability
in phonology.
Probabilistic phonology is the subject of the chapter by P (Chapter 30),
who reviews the history of the claim that statistics play a central role in the cognitive
system that allows individuals to acquire and use a phonological system; in particular, that
‘the phonological grammar is acquired by a process of statistical inference over linguistic
events of different frequencies, and furthermore the resulting mental representations
incorporate probabilities in some manner.’ The idea that phonology is probabilistic goes
:
back to Pānini, and the classic distinction between accidental and systematic gaps in the
lexicon is implicitly probabilistic. However, this idea took on new vigour with the devel-
opment of information theory by Shannon (1948), a work that influenced North American
phonology in the 1950s. Research using these tools has both demonstrated the importance
of probabilities in phonology, and identified cognitive and social factors that cause
deviations between what people experience and what they produce.
C & J (Chapter 31) write that the computational modelling of phon-
ology is almost as old as generative phonology itself. Their review focuses on finite-state
modelling, which, like generative grammar, has roots in automata theory. For much of its
history, computational modelling has tended to follow the phonological theory of the time,
being designed in turn to model derivational rules, autosegmental representations, and the
constraint systems of Optimality Theory. However, ‘computational modelling has evolved
from practical implementations of phonological theories to an active part of phonological
theory’. They discuss two strands of research that have informed phonological theory:
stochastic learning from corpus data and gradient acceptability judgements, and the study
of the computational nature of phonological patterns.
Computational modelling has had close connections to learnability theory. H &
R (Chapter 32) trace learnability as a research subject back to the ‘cognitive revolu-
tion’ of the 1950s which, spurred by advances in the theory of computation, transformed
linguistics and psychology. They write, ‘This marriage of many fields produced two new
twin disciplines, not identical, yet not completely distinct: Artificial Intelligence and
Cognitive Science. Language was crucial to the development of both.’ Despite the centrality
of linguistic issues to computer science, they observe that the history of learnability has
been mostly one-sided, with many ideas from computational learning models imported
into phonology, but rarely the converse. Their belief is that phonology provides a concrete,
14 .       
knowledge-rich domain in which solutions to learnability problems can be developed and

studied, and that phonologists are in a position to actively contribute to the science of
learning.
The final chapter in our volume is on phonology and evolution. D B (Chapter 33)
writes that, in the context of language, evolution can refer both to the biological evolution
of the human ability for language (i.e. the origins of language in the species) as well as to
the cultural evolution of languages (language change). Interest in these topics can be traced
back to the earliest writings on language, bringing us back to the traditions surveyed in Part
I, and on through figures such as Dante in the fourteenth century to the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century historical linguists. Contemporary thinking about evolution began
with the accounts of the origin of species by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
in 1858; in his The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin considered the formation of species and
languages to be ‘curiously parallel’. De Boer then reviews the century-long debate on the
evolution of the vocal tract, before turning to some reasons why the evolutionary perspec-
tive was eclipsed for much of the twentieth century. It is making a comeback in the early
twenty-first century, however, and more recent work looks at how evolutionary theory can
help to understand how phonological structure emerges and changes. Like the other topics
in this section, the evolution of phonology can be tackled anew in the light of modern
developments, in this case in the study of genetics and evolution, as well as advances in
phonetics and phonology.
1.4 Conclusion
In this concluding section we wish to make a few general observations about the history of
phonology that emerge from this volume. As is apparent from our brief survey of the
volume, the history of phonology does not follow a straight line, or show a monotonic
development towards ever more successful theories. Rather, we find certain themes and
tensions that recur in different guises over the years; some of these are:
➢ language as a property of an individual speaker versus language as a social object;

➢ derivations versus representations as the main mechanism of phonology;
➢ an aesthetic of ‘holism’ (van der Hulst & Ritter 2000), whereby phonology is
characterized by one predominant type of device, versus modularity, whereby phon-
ology is a collection of diverse subtheories geared to particular phenomena;
➢ a view of sounds as successive segments or feature bundles versus sounds as partici-
pating in ‘prosodies’ that may extend over stretches of speech;
➢ an understanding of phonological primes as features with two (or more) values
versus unary (single-valued) elements that are either present or absent;
➢ phonological primes as grounded in the phonetics of perception and production
versus formal cognitive entities with their own organizing principles;
➢ phonological universals versus the idiosyncrasies of particular languages;
➢ phonology as sharing certain principles with syntax versus phonology as being
fundamentally different from syntax.
:     15
These oppositions are not mutually exclusive: thus, language is a property of an

individual speaker as well as a social object; a theory of phonology requires both a theory
of representations and some notion of derivation (that is, a mapping between a lexically
stored form and a perceived or produced utterance); and so on. In most cases, the question
is not whether both sides of a dichotomy (say, representations or derivations) are needed;
the challenge is to know which phenomena should be assigned to one or the other. Perhaps
this is why these tensions have never been resolved: theories that come down strongly on
one side or another often have to make some accommodations to the other side. The
difficulty of arriving at a proper balance may account for the relative lack of continuity that
we find in the history of phonology. Fundamental debates are rarely decided in a conclu-
sive manner; rather, interest in certain topics wanes and attention shifts to other issues.
Because there are few matters in phonology that we can declare to be settled, there is a
certain value in being open to ideas that have been discarded: in a different context, they
may reveal new potential.
Nevertheless, one notion that recurs throughout the history of phonology is what we
have called the phonemic principle, the idea that sounds that are different can count as the
same at some level of linguistic analysis. Of course, there has been much disagreement as to
how exactly to define and implement this principle—what levels of analysis it should apply
to, and what conditions should be put on them—but a rejection of a particular definition of
the phoneme does not amount to rejection of the phonemic principle itself (Dresher 2011;
van der Hulst 2013).
The pervasiveness of the phonemic principle, its presence from the earliest times,
appears to vindicate the claim by Sapir ([1933] 1949) that ‘the phonemic attitude is
more basic, psychologically speaking, than the more strictly phonetic one’: ‘In the physical
world the naïve speaker and hearer actualize and are sensitive to sounds, but what they feel
themselves to be pronouncing and hearing are “phonemes.” ’
Finally, we recognize that every history reflects the preoccupations of those who write it.
The chapters in this book inevitably represent the interests of the authors; the choice and
arrangement of the chapters are those of the editors. Limitations of space prevent us from
including many topics and perspectives that merit inclusion in a history of phonology, and
it is our hope that they will find a place in a future volume.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our editors at OUP for their support: Julia Steer, who got this
project started, and Vicki Sunter, for editorial and design help. We also thank Vaishnavi
Ananthasubramanyam for overseeing the production of the volume, and Jeroen van de
Weijer for preparing the indexes. We are grateful for the insights and comments of the
individuals, too many to name here, who reviewed chapters and gave us other kinds of
advice.
I
EARLY INSIGHTS IN PHONOLOGY
2
Writing systems
Richard Sproat
2.1 Introduction
On 9 October 1446, King Sejong the Great, the fourth monarch of the Joseon Dynasty,
published 訓民正音, Hunmin Jeongeum ‘Proper Sounds for the Education of the People’.
Up until that time, literacy in Korea had meant literacy in Classical Chinese, and it was
therefore a skill only accessible to those with time to learn another language and its
complex writing system. The Hunmin Jeongeum proposed a much simpler system based
on twenty-eight segmental symbols, designed specifically for the Korean language, one that
Sejong hoped would be more accessible to the common people than traditional Chinese
writing. The system was remarkable not only for its simplicity, but also for the amount of
articulatory phonetic knowledge that went into its design. The consonant letters in
particular were designed to look like articulators or places of articulation relevant for the
sound in question so that, for example, the apical sound /s/ was written with a symbol ㅅ
that looks like a tooth; the labial sound /m/ was written with ㅁ representing the mouth
viewed from the front (in fact identical in appearance to the Chinese character 口 kou
‘mouth’, which was descended from a pictograph representing the mouth viewed from the
front); and the velar /k/ is represented with ㄱ, which represents the back of the tongue as it
would be raised for a /k/.
Sejong’s system, known today as Hangul (‘great writing’), is now the sole writing system
used for Korean. Because of the systematic and phonetically informed way in which it
represents sounds, it is widely regarded as the most linguistically informed writing system
ever developed (see also Duanmu & Kubozono, Chapter 4, this volume).
But all full writing systems—systems where it is possible to represent in writing a very
large proportion of what can be said in speech—must represent sound even if very
imperfectly, and thus the history of phonology really begins with the history of writing.
In this chapter we discuss how writing systems encode sound. We also discuss how
phonological theory has influenced the design of various aspects of writing systems, and
how writing influences and is influenced by people’s awareness of phonology. Finally we
explain by way of example why awareness of phonology was crucial for the development of
full writing systems, and why full writing would be impossible without it.
2.2 Symbol systems before writing
Humans have been using visible marks to communicate information for thousands of
years. Whoever was the first to mark a pot with a piece of charcoal to indicate possession
was using a sign that conveyed a particular meaning: ‘this is mine’. While written language
Richard Sproat, Writing systems In: The Oxford History of Phonology. Edited by: B. Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst,
Oxford University Press. © Richard Sproat 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796800.003.0002
20  
predominates in modern literate cultures as the means of communicating information via

visible marks, we still use a large number of symbols that, because they do not depend on
any particular language for their interpretation, are non-linguistic. Anyone who sees the
familiar red, white, and blue helix outside a barbershop and understands its meaning, is
mentally processing a non-linguistic symbol. One can ‘read’ the symbol in any language,
but the meaning is always the same: you can get your hair cut here.
Non-linguistic symbols need not be simplex, as in the previous example. Barber poles
are rarely combined with other symbols, but in mathematical symbology, or in musical
notation, one can build up whole ‘sentences’ with complex interpretations based on the
elementary symbols of the system. Invariably such systems have their own syntax: As an
R
example of a syntactic restriction in mathematical symbology, the integral sign is written
before rather than, say, after, the expression over which one is integrating. There is nothing
in these systems that depends on language. One can ‘read’ a mathematical equation in any
language one chooses, but what the symbols represent are mathematical concepts rather
than linguistic entities. In true writing, in contrast, the symbols represent linguistic
entities—sounds, morphemes, words . . . —and writing systems are thus said to be linguistic
symbol systems.
Non-linguistic symbols predate writing by thousands of years. Some cultures never
developed writing on their own, though they certainly had non-linguistic symbols. One
example of a non-linguistic symbol system from relatively recent times is the Dakota
system of ‘winter counts’ (Mallery 1883), whereby a pictographic symbol would be created
to represent a salient event from a particular year, and a whole history, of sorts, could be
recorded by creating a text from such symbols written, for example, on buffalo hide.
An ancient system (dating to about 10,000 years ago), and a possible precursor to true
writing, was the Mesopotamian system of ‘tokens’ to represent various kinds of agricultural
commodities, a system we will discuss further in the next section. In the supplementary
materials to Sproat (2014),¹ I present an initial taxonomy of non-linguistic symbol systems.
The taxonomy is by no means complete, but it serves to illustrate the wide range of kinds of
information that can be encoded by such systems.
Gelb (1963) discussed various non-linguistic systems under the rubric of ‘pre-writing’
and indeed it is common in books on writing systems to present a handful of these systems
as a segue into the discussion of true writing systems. The term ‘pre-writing’ is misleading
since it implies that such systems are precursors to writing, whereas in fact this has rarely
been the case. As we shall discuss more in the next section, the precursors to most writing
systems that were developed independently of any contact with a literate civilization are
unknown. Only in Mesopotamia are there at least defensible theories that link early writing
to a clearly non-linguistic system, and even there the link is somewhat tenuous.
What is key about non-linguistic symbol systems, as we have discussed, is that they do
not depend on language, and hence are ‘readable’ in any language. This language-
independence obviously conveys some advantages. A mathematician who cannot read
Russian will nonetheless be able to make at least some sense out of a mathematical article
written in Russian, so long as the author uses internationally recognized notation. Even
more obviously, a musician need not be able to read Russian to be able to play a piece by
¹ https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/archived-documents/Sproat_Lg_90_2.pdf
  21
Tchaikovsky. But this language-independence comes at a price: despite the sophistication

of some non-linguistic systems, they are always limited in the kinds of information they
can represent. To give an example that is due in part to DeFrancis (1989), while one can
read any mathematical equation in English and have it be understood by an English
speaker who has sufficient mathematical sophistication, one cannot represent the
Gettysburg Address using mathematical symbols. For that one needs a symbol system
that is tied to and therefore parasitizes off of language, and the key to being able to do that
is figuring out how to encode phonology. We turn to this point in the next section.
2.3 The earliest writing: The discovery of phonology
There are hundreds of scripts and writing systems in the world. Some scripts have evolved
over the course of time. The most widely used of these today is the Roman alphabet, which
is used in the writing systems of hundreds of languages. As is well-known, this script was
borrowed from Etruscan writing, which in turn was borrowed from Greek, who learned (or
relearned, see section 2.4) writing from the Phoenicians, whose script in turn can be traced
back to the earliest Semitic scripts of the Sinai.
Some scripts and writing systems have been more or less consciously invented. Indeed
writing systems have been invented many times throughout history, over thousands of
years, with some, such as the Adlam script for Fula (Waddell 2016), having been developed
within the last few decades. But nearly all of these inventions had one thing in common:
the inventor(s) knew of writing and were more or less familiar with how it worked. The
Barry brothers, who invented Adlam, were familiar with other ways to write their
language—either in Roman or a modified version of the Arabic script—but felt for various
reasons that they were not adequate. Sequoyah was illiterate when he invented Cherokee
writing, but had seen many examples of English writing, and understood that it repre-
sented the English language, even though he did not understand how it represented English
(Gnanadesikan 2009). And the earliest Semitic scripts were likely modelled on the phono-
logical portion of Egyptian writing (Goldwasser 2010).
In only four places—Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and Central America—has writing
that we know to be writing clearly evolved independently of any known external influence.
Many theories have been proposed on how writing evolved, with much of the focus being
on Mesopotamia, where writing seems to have evolved the earliest (around 5,200 years
ago), and where the evidence for prelinguistic notation systems is the strongest. One well-
known theory is the token theory originally due to Oppenheim (1959) and more recently
developed and widely promulgated by Denise Schmandt-Besserat (1996). The basic thesis
is that clay tokens used to represent various kinds of commodities came to be used to
represent those commodities in texts formed by impressing the tokens onto clay, and over
the course of time, with pressure to expand the system for wider use, symbols were
invented or extended to represent a larger set of concepts, and ultimately specific words
or morphemes. The theory is not widely accepted today (see Woods et al. 2010: 48‒9), but
most Near Eastern specialists still accept the idea that Mesopotamian writing evolved from
some sort of non-linguistic system, most likely used for accounting.
Why in only four places? In an excellent comparative study, Wang (2014) details how
writing was used in China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Meso-America as part of the
22  
administrative machinery of these ancient states. In addition, he compares these four states
with other complex civilizations, such as the Inca, who never developed full writing.
According to Wang, the Incas simplified the process of accounting by ‘imprison[ing
their] craft specialists’ (Wang 2014: 119), thus exerting complete control over their output,
making accounting for that output easier. Though writing is a product of civilization, this
does not mean that a complex civilization necessarily will develop writing.
But other factors besides comparative economics may be at play. Full writing depends
on a critical insight: that a symbol which had heretofore been used to represent an idea,
could be used instead to represent the sound of a word or morpheme associated with that
idea. This is useful, since it allows one to potentially represent other words or morphemes
that are similar in sound, but which might be difficult to depict. But for this rebus principle
to work well, it must be the case that one can readily find similar sounding words, and here
the phonology of the language could be a factor (Steinthal 1852; Daniels 1992; Boltz 2000;
Buckley 2008). For example, if a language has largely or exclusively monosyllabic mor-
phemes it would, ceteris paribus, be easier to find close homophones with different
meanings than would be the case for a language with longer morphemes; and this in
turn would mean that it would be easier to find a means to spell a morpheme that
heretofore had not had a spelling. To give one example, the Sumerian symbol /ti/
‘arrow’ was extended to mean ‘life’ or ‘live’, which had the phonological form /ti/.
Alternatively, if the language had longer morphemes, there might be circumstances
where one could be a bit more relaxed about what it counts for one morpheme to
‘sound like’ something else. For example, if a language has Semitic-like root and pattern
morphology or a regular process of ablaut, where a morpheme can typically occur with
various vowel patterns, vowels might not count heavily in deciding when two morphemes
are phonologically similar. The earliest writing systems did indeed seem to be associated
with languages that had either largely monosyllabic morphemes (Sumerian, Chinese,
Mayan), or else a root-and-pattern style morphology (Egyptian).²
Here then is the first sense in which phonology plays a crucial role—in the very develop-
ment of writing itself. For in order to represent the full range of what people can convey using
speech, writing must make recourse to encoding phonological information (DeFrancis 1984,
1989). We will return in section 2.6 to justify the ‘must’ in the previous statement. In the next
few sections, we turn to a discussion of how writing represents phonology, how phonology
has influenced the development of scripts and writing systems, and how people’s awareness of
phonology has influenced and has been influenced by writing systems.
2.4 Segments versus syllables in the development

of writing systems
2.4.1 Phonology and the taxonomy of writing.
Full writing systems must encode phonology but to greater or lesser degrees they also
represent semantic, or if one prefers, lexical information. The standard example of a
² The importance of phonological structure is also supported in the computational evolutionary model
reported in Sproat (2017).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS IN
AMERICAN HISTORY ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

will be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright
in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and without
paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General
Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if
you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the
trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the
Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such
as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and
printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in
the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright
law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially
commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this
work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase
“Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of
the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or
online at www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand,
agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual
property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to
abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using
and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for
obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms
of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by
people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.
There are a few things that you can do with most Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the
full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There
are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™
electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and
help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright
law in the United States and you are located in the United
States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying,
distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works
based on the work as long as all references to Project
Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will
support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project
Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this
agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms
of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with
its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it
without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project

Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project
Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed,
viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United

States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it
away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg
License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United
States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to
anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges.
If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of
paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use
of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth
in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder.
Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™
License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright
holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files
containing a part of this work or any other work associated with
Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute
this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1
with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the
Project Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if
you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project
Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other format used in the official version posted on the official
Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at
no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a
means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project
Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™
works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or

providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project

Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different
terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain
permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™
trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3
below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on,
transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright
law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite
these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the
medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,”
such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt
data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other
medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES -

Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in
paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic
work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for
damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU
AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE,
STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH
OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH
1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER
THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR
ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF
THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If

you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you
paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you
received the work from. If you received the work on a physical
medium, you must return the medium with your written
explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the
defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu
of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or
entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.
If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund
in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set

forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’,
WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR
ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this
agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this
agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the
maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable
state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of
this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the

Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless
from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that
arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project
Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or
deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect
you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new
computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of
volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project
Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™
collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In
2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was
created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project
Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your
efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the
Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-
profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the
laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by
the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal
tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax
deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and
your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500

West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact
links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation’s website and official page at
www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to

the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission
of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works
that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form
accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated
equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly
important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws

regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of
the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform
and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many
fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not
solicit donations in locations where we have not received written
confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or
determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit
www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states

where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know
of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from
donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot

make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations
received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp
our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current

donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a
number of other ways including checks, online payments and
credit card donations. To donate, please visit:
www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could
be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose
network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by
copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus,
we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any
particular paper edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear
about new eBooks.

The Oxford History of Phonology B Elan Dresher Editor Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Oxford History of Phonology B Elan Dresher Editor Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Oxford History of Phonology B.

Elan Dresher (Editor)

The Oxford History of Phonology

The Oxford History

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

List of Figures and Tables ix

1. Introduction: Leading ideas in phonology 1

I. EARLY INSIGHTS IN PHONOLOGY

II. THE FOUNDERS OF PHONOLOGY

13. Boas—Sapir—Bloomﬁeld: The synchronicization of phonology in

IV. PHONOLOGY AFTER SPE

20. Phonological derivation in early generative phonology 419

V. NEW METHODS AND APPROACHES

List of Figures and Tables

x     

     xi

28.1. Minimal contrasts represented by the acoustic-auditory features [compact]

AAC Augmentative and Alternative Communication

xiv   

Stratal OT Stratal Optimality Theory

xviii  

  xix

  xxi

xxii  

The aim of this volume is to provide an up-to-date history of phonology, written by

1.1 Previous histories of phonology

2 .       

1.2 Plan of the volume

:     3

generative phonology. Constraint-and-repair approaches to phonology, which put an

1.3 Leading ideas in phonology

1.3.1 Part I: Early insights in phonology

4 .       

:     5

1.3.2 Part II: The founders of phonology

6 .       

:     7

1.3.3 Part III: Mid-twentieth-century developments in phonology

8 .       

:     9

1.3.4 Part IV: Phonology after SPE

10 .       

:     11

12 .       

1.3.5 Part V: New methods and approaches

:     13

14 .       

knowledge-rich domain in which solutions to learnability problems can be developed and

➢ language as a property of an individual speaker versus language as a social object;

:     15

These oppositions are not mutually exclusive: thus, language is a property of an

2.2 Symbol systems before writing

predominates in modern literate cultures as the means of communicating information via

Tchaikovsky. But this language-independence comes at a price: despite the sophistication

2.3 The earliest writing: The discovery of phonology

2.4 Segments versus syllables in the development

2.4.1 Phonology and the taxonomy of writing.

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only