🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan27.040154.20592@midway.uchicago.edu>, goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes:
> What is a phoneme?  (Not a joke question; I just discovered that
> I honestly don't know, and suspect that nobody else does, either.
> Perhaps this is just sheer arrogance on my part, though, so I ask
> everyone now...).

I'll go way out on a limb and make most of the readership made at me
with this definition:

	A phoneme is the minimal psychological construct representing
	certain sounds which occur in a given language.

This accounts nicely for allophones, which are the actual sounds
corresponding to a given construct, and does not lock us in to stupid
attempts to locate phonemes out there in actual speech, as the
structuralists before Chomsky tried to do.  It also avoids the
Chomsky-Hallean stupidity of *denying* phonemes entirely in favor
of feature matrices, which are fine for analyzing and contrasting
sounds and for constructing phonological rules, but which tell us
nothing about how speakers conceptualize sounds.

Attack if you dare; I'm spoiling for a fight.

--Leo Connolly