🚀 go-pugleaf

connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:

>> What is a phoneme?
>
>I'll go way out on a limb and make most of the readership mad at me
>with this definition:
>
>	A phoneme is the minimal psychological construct representing
>	certain sounds which occur in a given language.

This is intuitively correct.  In fact, I don't think that Chomsky him-
self is really all that concerned about phonemes.  It was Halle that
got into all the matrices.  I also don't believe that either denied the
existence of systematic units called phonemes.  They just made them far
more abstract, and treated them as bundles of features.  The term for
their kind of phoneme is "systematic phoneme."

Chomsky effectively showed that systematic phonemes were more practical
and general that the so-called "autonomous" ones (i.e. ones treated as
irreducable psychological units defined by distributional contrastive-
ness).  If we use autonomous phonemes in biblical Hebrew, for instance,
we end up with way, way more phonemes than we want or need.  The idea of
a systematic phoneme is one of those units that are left when all of the
ostensibly regular phonological rules are reversed (rules which may cre-
ate superficially minimal pairs, but which in fact are simply reflexes
of a much simpler underlying system).

The only criticism I would level at your definition is that it is
vague.  Can you offer us a discovery procedure like the descriptivists
and structuralists had?  Can you offer us a cognitive model and a for-
malism, like what generative phonologists have?  Simply calling a phoneme
a "psychological construct representing certain sounds" doesn't move us
off of square one.

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

Tell you what.  I'll believe that your definition is clear if you can
take a standard data set, and show how your definition of the phoneme
offers us a superior way of describing some synchronic phonological pro-
cess.

I'm not so much spoiling for a fight as I am spoiling for some examples :-).

-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer