ABSTRACT
Government Phonology (GP) grew out of developments of autosegmental phonology that characterized phonological research in the 1980s. This chapter lays out key assumptions and basic design properties of GP, focusing on the relationship between phonology and phonetics, as well as the way computation works. It presents the element theory, and offers a historical overview of the representational theory of elements as contrasted with distinctive features. GP takes the modular architecture of grammar seriously and holds that the interface with phonetics works exactly in the same way: a spell-out operation assigns a phonetic value to phonological primes through a lexical specification. This is called phonetic interpretation. Rooted in the properties of the universal Turing machine, serialism lies at the heart of the standard theory of Cognitive Science that emerged in the 1950s, and whose application to linguistics produced generative grammar. GP participated in the anti-serialist movement, considering that extrinsic rule ordering was empirically vacuous.
