Formal Phonology *

Two problematic trends have dominated modern phonological theorizing: over-reliance on machinery of Universal Grammar, and reification of functional properties in grammar. The former trend leads to arbitrary postulation of grammatical principles because UG “has no cost”, which leads to a welter of contradictory and unresolvable claims. The latter trend amounts to rejection of phonology and indeed grammatical computation, as a legitimate independent area of scientific investigation. This paper outlines Formal Phonology, which is a metatheoretical approach rooted in an inductive epistemology, committed to seriously engaging the fundamental logic of the discipline, one which demands justification of claims and an integrated consideration of what is known about phonological grammars, eschewing ad libitum conjectures and isolated positing of novel claims without evaluating how the claim interacts with other aspects of phonology. Debate over the proper mechanism for apparent segment-transparency in harmony, or the binary vs. privative nature of features, is ultimately doomed if we do not have a clear awareness of what a “grammar” and a “phonology” are. Misconstruing the nature of a phonology as being a model of observed behavior negatively affects theoretical choices, leads to confusion over what could motivate a claim about the nature of grammar, and in general, a lack of developed epistemological foundation leads to confusion over how to approach theory-construction. 1. The object of study in Generative Phonology An obvious fact about language is that developmentally-normal adults can produce and comprehend an unbounded set of sentences in their language. What is most striking is that speakers can produce and interpret vast numbers of utterances that they have never heard before and could not have learned. This is only possible if speakers use a stock of primitive units plus a system of rules to create utterances, and children learn the primitives and rules rather than learning actual utterances. This then raises two central scientific questions. First, what is the nature of the rule system that enables speakers to create utterances: what does the system do, and how does it do it? Second, how are those rules automatically learned by observation of speech behavior, when the child acquires its language. What is actually learned? A central feature of the theory of generative grammar is the claim that there are special cognitive properties which are particular to the human language faculty. This means that human language has a particular nature, and its nature does not reduce to general statements about human mental ability. A system of rules – a grammar – operates on stored representations, and the fundamental goal of generative grammatical research has been to discover the nature of grammars and representations. The generative enterprise then logically reduces to positing theoretical conclusions in the form of general propositions * This is a fragment of a draft of a longer work, still in progress. It is the result of numerous influences, and I hope those whose ideas appear here do not object to my co-opting their ideas and not even bothering to give credit where credit is due. I do want to specifically point to the obvious influence of the work of Hale and Reiss. Thanks to Kevin Gabbard, Kati Hout, Martin Krämer, Mike Marlo, Mary Paster, Markus Pöchtrager and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 1 See Chomsky (1965: 4) for a standard characterization of a generative grammar as a perfectly explicit description of the competence of the ideal speaker-hearer.