A Companion to Chomsky. Группа авторов
models of phonology proposes. If grammar is internal, then external facts like the behavior of gases under pressure or the properties of the muscles controlling the lips, are not directly available to the grammar (although they may play some role in filtering the kinds of data that learners can have access to).
For a particularly egregious abuse of phonetic motivation, consider the parameterized constraints of McCarthy (1996, p. 223), e.g. “the meaning of this constraint is this: the constraint is violated if a surface stop, or its underlying correspondent is immediately preceded by a vowel.” In other words, phonetic (articulatory or acoustic) motivation is supposed to explain bans on potential sequences of segments across levels of representation: a stop consonant should not appear in a surface representation if its correspondent in the underlying representation is preceded by a vowel. In contrast to this approach referring to marked or banned potential structures, SPE handles such phenomena by treating a language's phonology as a function composed of multiple rules. As in mathematics and logic, the order of composition matters. There are no teleological conspiracies to repair, cure or optimize representations; no attempts by the grammar to facilitate articulation or comprehension according to vague claims about the “communicative function” of language (see papers in Hayes et al. 2004, for examples of this view). In the SPE tradition, grammar models “dumb,” mechanical computation—that's a good thing, since grammars don't have goals and desires, even if people do. The SPE arguments given against building markedness into the formal theory are consistent with the idea of phonology as naturalistic inquiry, and these convincing arguments are only reinforced by the inconsistencies in markedness‐based approaches.
6.6 Conclusion
Zenon Pylyshyn (1984, p. xix) suggests that “the kinds of theories cognitive scientists entertain are intimately related to the set of tacit assumptions they make about the very foundations of the field of cognitive science. In cognitive science the gap between metatheory and practice is extremely narrow.” As elsewhere, Chomsky's work revolutionized the foundations of phonology, yet the implications of SPE and related work have been neglected, to the detriment of the field. This is consistent with the failure of phonologists to accord enough weight to clear, accessible arguments made by scholars like Fodor, Jackendoff, and even Kant, relating to leading ideas of Chomsky's general philosophical outlook. Beyond phonology, philosophers and psychologists, as well as syntacticians and semanticists interested in “big picture” issues like naturalism, internalism and nativism, would be well served by paying more attention to the achievements of SPE. Working in the field, we remain enthusiastic about discovering not only how these leading ideas apply in phonology, but also how new phonological arguments can bolster Chomsky's often radical, broad philosophical stands.
Endnotes
1 1 Crucially, when linguists discuss small scale variation, they make a more fine grained generalization and talk about dialects, even regiolects, with the exact same logic, just a different “zoom factor.”
2 2 The term substantive here means “having substantive (phonetic, speech‐related) correlates,” not “being substance”—an important distinction often misinterpreted in the phonological literature.
3 3 Passages like this understandably lead Rey (2003) to the contention that linguists, including Chomsky, actually are intentionalist when they are not being philosophical.
4 4 We discuss many of the themes covered here in greater detail elsewhere (Hale and Reiss 2008; Bale and Reiss 2018; Volenec and Reiss 2018, 2020; Reiss 2017).
5 5 In our view, this field of “child phonology” has nothing to do with competence grammars, and everything to do with children's immature performance systems (Chomsky 1964a; Smith 2010; Hale and Reiss 1998, 2008).
6 6 McCarthy and Prince (1995, p. 88) “claim that the operative constraint here is a requirement that posterior stops (i.e., velars) be voiceless—to be referred to as POSTVCLS. This constraint phonologizes the familiar articulatory effect of Boyle's law: it is difficult to maintain voicing when the supraglottal cavity is small.”
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