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6 Naturalism, Internalism, and Nativism:
CHARLES REISSAND VENO VOLENEC
Concordia University, Montréal, Canada
6.1 Basics of SPE Phonology
Phonology is the study of abstract sound patterns in human language, as opposed to phonetics, which studies all aspects of speech, including articulation and acoustics. We illustrate with a somewhat simplified example. In Québec French, the adjective meaning ‘small’ shows an alternation between the tense vowel [i] in the open syllable of the masculine form petit [ptsi] vs. the lax [I] in the corresponding feminine form petite [ptsIt], where the syllable is closed by the consonant [t], reflecting a general phonological pattern: [i] and [I] are in complementary distribution determined by syllable structure. In English, the same phonetic vowels occur, with the same vocal tract configurations and corresponding sound spectra (modulo accidental details). However, the English vowels can appear in the same environment, say between a [b] and a [t] in a closed syllable, as in beet [bit] vs. bit [bIt]. So, we can say that English and Québec French have the same two vowels phonetically, but the phonological status of [i] and [I] differs in the two languages.
In The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968, henceforth SPE) and most phonological models, this difference consists of two factors, a representational difference and a computational difference:
Québec French has the same vowel stored in the representations of petit and petite, say /i/, and a mental computation turns /i/ into [I] in a closed syllable. The difference in pronunciation is a result of a specific computation.
English has different vowels stored in the representations of beet and bit. The stored representational (featural) distinction persists in pronunciation.
The phonology of each language consists of various computations. In SPE the computations are called rules, and the phonology of a language is a complex function resulting from composing the rules in a particular order. The input to the phonology is called an underlying representation, and the output is called a surface representation or, somewhat confusingly, a “phonetic representation.” The mapping of an underlying form to a surface form by the computational system is called a derivation. It is the output of the derivation, the “phonetic” form, that is the input to the mechanisms leading to speech, and this output form should not be confused with the actual articulatory movements and their concomitant acoustic results.
6.2 Internalism in Phonology
Our simple example from Québec French allows us to discuss one of the most important notions of SPE phonology, and Chomsky's linguistics more generally: radical internalism. The input representations referred to above consist of morphemes, minimal data structures containing (at least) semantic and phonological information. Under the internalist perspective, these morphemes are encoded as (or, just are) information in the minds/brains of speakers. They are not in books, in the air, or anywhere out in the world as properties of speech communities. When we informally refer to speakers of ‘Québec French’ or ‘English’ we assume an idealized population that is identical in all ways relevant to the phenomenon under discussion, say having type‐identical vowels in type‐identical morphemes in their lexicon.1 So, the internalism that is standard in other aspects of Chomsky's linguistics, and is in fact the most profound consequence of the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, is equally relevant to Chomsky's phonology.
According to the discussion on p. 3 of SPE, language is taken to be a system of knowledge that is fully internal to the human mind: “The person who has acquired knowledge of language has internalized a system of rules that determines sound‐meaning connections for indefinitely many sentences.” This “for the most part, obviously, unconscious knowledge,” which is “realized physically in a finite human brain”, is referred to as “the speaker‐hearer's competence,” and it should be strictly distinguished from “performance,” that is, from “what the speaker‐hearer actually does” with this knowledge on a particular occasion. The general goal of linguistics “is the construction of a grammar,” where grammar refers to “the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the speaker's competence.” Of course, competence cannot be observed directly. Its properties can only be discovered indirectly, for example by inferring them on the basis of evidence provided by performance. Since performance “is