ABSTRACT
In Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English (SPE) (1968), the task of accounting for morphological alternations is ascribed almost entirely to the phonological component of the grammar, and is the most prominent function that that component performs. Among graduate students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) around 1970, it was common to hear a language described as ‘having no phonology’ when what was meant was that it had no alternations of the kind that most of the phonological rules of SPE were devoted to describing. Today the phonological landscape has changed vastly. Phonology is seen as having many tasks in areas which were neglected in early generative work; conversely, few generative phonologists would now see all morphological alternations as falling within the scope of phonology proper.
