ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, it was mentioned that standard generative phonology rejected classical phonemic representations and licensed underlying representations which can be quite remote from allo-phonic representations. The practice in this area is not monolithic and there are competing schools of thought. Nevertheless, there is an unbroken tradition of MIT-based work going back to the early 1960s and embodied in the monumental Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968) which endorses representations far removed from the surface in order to capture linguistically significant generalizations. Researchers in this tradition do accept some kind of naturalness principle: other things being equal, underlying representations should be identical to surface representations. But other things are not equal and the body of regularities and subregularities characterizing natural languages requires abstract representations connected to the surface by an intricate set of rules and principles. The area considered in 4.2 is a small but crucial portion of English segmental phonology – namely, the English Vowel Shift (well known as a diachronic process but argued below to be part of a synchronic account of English) and its implications for other rules of the phonology. The main signposts guiding the presentation here are Chomsky and Halle (1968), Halle (1977), and Halle and Mohanan (1985). 1 Since Halle and Mohanan’s article is cast within the framework of Lexical Phonology and integrates concepts of metrical structure to be introduced later in Ch. 6, the presentation will attempt to concentrate on the core of arguments lying behind the analyses considered here which have remained relatively stable since SPE. Some of the representational issues will be raised again in the following chapters. In 4.3, a number of objections to SPE-type analyses of modern English are presented and, in 4.4, an alternative framework – Natural Generative Phonology (NGP) – is outlined and discussed. Section 4.5 offers a brief reconsideration of the Vowel Shift in the light of our discussion of NGP.
