Functional (generative) phonology

[Dianne K. Patterson]

Two points:
1) Geoffrey Nathan has sent a letter referencing Happy99.exe, a well known
and nasty little virus.  What is all that about?
2) I've just spent the last 6 years of my life trying to understand the
sound categories used by a parrot (Alex) who has referential use of
English words.  He does have minimal pairs of words (for ex., "tea" "key")
and the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of these sound
categories /t/ vs /k/ etc. are quite different.  Now, I have to be careful
and call these "phoneme-like" categories...because, of course, he may not
have the perceptual trading relations that humans have for these
categories etc. etc. but I think that the existence of these categories is
evidence of an intriguing class of problems about the human/language
specificity of the "phoneme".  Interestingly, Alex also engages in word
play in which he drops the onset off of a word and sticks on a new onset
to create word-like items that he's never heard before.  This word play
seems to conform to certain restrictions that are natural-class like (that
is, he might take /k/ off of "key" and put on "ch" in its place, but he'd
never stick a vowel in its place.
At any rate, I thought you all might be interested in the "Alex"
phenomenon.
Dianne Patterson
U of A


On Thu, 25 Mar 1999, Geoffrey S. Nathan wrote:

>         I think that people's assessment that 'generative' phonology is becoming
> more 'functional' (all scare quotes deliberate) is quite correct.
>         I am, as some of you know, a died-in-the-wool functional phonologist (in
> the American, rather than the European sense), a student of David Stampe,
> and I have been trying to integrate the principles of Natural Phonology
> with the concepts of Cognitive Grammar.  But I continue to follow the
> paradigm in what has evolved out of Generative Phonology.  While some
> practitioners continue to ignore phonetic considerations, others,
> especially many at the leading edge of Optimality Theory development, are
> attempting to build articulatory and (occasionally) acoustic considerations
> into the grammar.  I should point out, in addition, that not all functional
> considerations are purely 'phonetic'.  Bruce Hayes, for example, has done
> some very nice work on the nature of rhythm and how human rhythmic behavior
> contributes to the nature of stress systems in the world's languages.  And,
> of course, in my work I have argued that phonemes are categories, and
> consequently such categorization principles as prototypicality and image
> schema transformations apply to relate members of categories--again, these
> are 'functional' considerations which go beyond the issue of the plumbing
> used in producing sounds.
>         For what it's worth, when there was a conference held two years ago in
> Milwaukee on formalism/functionalism, the phonologists among us (Hayes,
> Hammond, Bybee, me) had far more to say to each other than the
> syntacticians and semanticists.    The convergence is greater at the
> phonological level than at higher ones.  </Shameless self-promotion
> on>Volume one of that conference will be out from Benjamins in a month or
> so, incidentally.</ss-p off>
>
> Geoff
>
>
> Geoffrey S. Nathan
> Department of Linguistics
> Southern Illinois University at Carbondale,
> Carbondale, IL, 62901 USA
> Phone:  +618 453-3421 (Office)   FAX +618 453-6527
> +618 549-0106 (Home)
>