Читать книгу A Companion to Chomsky - Группа авторов - Страница 66

SPE phonology explicitly adopts strict and consistent naturalism, internalism and nativism. We have indicated that much recent work rejects without justification the nativism of SPE. However, another rampant problem in the literature is an over‐eager implausible nativism, deriving, we believe, from a misreading of SPE. This work, based on the vague notion of markedness, is portrayed as a development of a passage in SPE itself:

The problem is that our approach to features, to rules and to evaluation has been overly formal. Suppose, for example, that we were systematically to interchange features or to replace [F] by [‐F] (where is +, and F is a feature) throughout our description of English structure. There is nothing in our account of linguistic theory to indicate that the result would be the description of a system that violates certain principles governing human languages. To the extent that this is true, we have failed to formulate the principles of linguistic theory, of universal grammar, in a satisfactory manner. In particular, we have not made use of the fact that the features have intrinsic content. [p. 400]

Unfortunately, the literature on markedness ignores a later passage where Chomsky and Halle acknowledge that a formal model of phonological computation should probably not make reference to “intrinsic content” of features:

It does not seem likely that an elaboration of the theory along the lines just reviewed will allow us to dispense with phonological processes that change features fairly freely. The second stage of the Velar Softening Rule of English (40) and of the Second Velar Palatalization of Slavic strongly suggests that the phonological component requires wide latitude in the freedom to change features, along the lines of the rules discussed in the body of this book.[p. 428]

So, Chomsky and Halle conclude that the computational system that makes up the phonological module cannot be understood by reference to functional considerations of naturalness or restrictions on surface forms. This conclusion is echoed elsewhere: “Where properties of language can be explained on such ‘functional’ grounds, they provide no revealing insight into the nature of mind. Precisely because the explanations proposed here are ‘formal explanations,’ precisely because the proposed principles are not essential or even natural properties of any imaginable language, they provide a revealing mirror of the mind (if correct)” (Chomsky 1971, p. 44).

If we agree with Chomsky (2007) that “the less attributed to genetic information (in our case, the topic of UG) for determining the development of an organism, the more feasible the study of its evolution,” then not only the highly specific constraints mentioned above, for particular morphemes in particular languages, but pretty much every putative expression of ill‐formedness or markedness, needs to be banished from theorizing about UG.

Our own interpretation of the legacy of SPE includes the following components:

1 We assume that phonological UG contains innate features, and that this assumption is in line with what was referred to in SPE as “universal phonetics,” including a set of substantive features that are “independent of any particular language” and that determine “a certain infinite class of possible phonetic representations from which the phonetic forms of sentences of any human language are drawn” (SPE, p. 8). Despite the disrepute into which the universal phonetics view has fallen, we believe that the arguments given in SPE and Chomsky and Halle (1965), remain convincing.

2 Possibly some other representational primitives or structure‐building algorithms to account for syllables, feet, stress, and other phenomena that we assume are also part of phonological UG.

3 Some basic logical operations that define the mappings among the representations. This part of the model can be called a theory of structural changes for the rules in a derivation. In our own recent work (e.g., Leduc et al. Forthcoming; Bale and Reiss 2018), we have deconstructed the traditional SPE arrow and replaced it with set subtraction and unification for a wide range of processes.

4 A theory of environments that determines the conditions under which one part of a representation can trigger a nonvacuous mapping to another representation in a derivation. For example, there appear to be rules in which a consonantal change in a syllable onset is triggered by a consonant in the immediately preceding onset. Could a rule be triggered by any preceding onset at any distance? Many scholars have worked on such questions about locality in phonology. Our own prejudice is that actual segmental adjacency, which is the most typical condition in rules is just a special case of long‐distance interaction.

5 Closely linked to the innateness of features as components of a universal representational code, is the notion, accepted in SPE, of a universal phonetic interpretation of features (and other representational primitives). In addition to participating in phonological representation and computation, features also serve as the basis for phonetic interpretation at the interface between linguistic competence and the sensory‐motor system: “the distinctive features provide a representation of an utterance which can be interpreted as a set of instructions to the physical articulatory system, or as a refined level of perceptual representation” (p. 65).³ This no longer falls under the purview of phonology, and so SPE provides only cursory remarks about the interpretation of features in speech production or perception, suggesting that it is governed by “universal interpretative conventions” (p. 403). In other words, the output of the grammar, the surface or “phonetic” representation, is transduced to speech output in an invariant manner, not specific to any particular language. This position is either ignored or presented as patently false by much recent work, but a full defense is not possible here (see Volenec and Reiss (2018) for details).The issue arises when putatively identical featural representations (using pretty much any current model of phonological primes) are said to have different pronunciations in different languages. To make this concrete, recall our discussion of the vowels [i] and [I] in English and Québec French. In fact, the [i] of petit and the [i] of beet are somewhat different. The universal phonetics perspective of SPE requires that the two vowels in fact be phonologically different, encoded differently in long‐term memory. The rejected alternative (adopted by most other work) is that the two can be (type)‐identical but realized differently by post‐phonological language‐specific rules of phonetic implementation.