Martha McGinnis: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Mike Maxwell)

[Martha McGinnis]

Dear Mike,

There is, or should be, a relationship between lexical phonology and
DM.  Under DM there is no phonology in the pre-syntactic lexicon, so
there's an issue as to how the insights of LP should be recaptured.
For example, if there really is a highly local morphosyntactic domain
within which phonological rules must be 'structure-preserving', this
is an important insight no matter what theory we adopt. I think we
could stand more postings on LP, if people want to continue the
discussion here.

However, no more postings about 'taxonomic phonemes' will be
forwarded until someone defines the term.

-Martha


>Mike Maxwell wrote:
>
>Dan Everett wrote:
>
> >The really neat idea behind SP in Lexical Phonology,
> >as I understand it, is that lexical rules will be structure-
> >preserving *because* in the lexicon there are no
> >allophones, only phonemes of one sort or another...
> >(Now, the output of the lexicon, according to Mohanon
> >and others, turns out to be the so-called taxonomic
> >phoneme of structuralism.  This is a good result,
> >since it turns out, according to some LP research
> >and a lot of structuralist work, that people have
> >intuitions not about abstract or systematic phonemes,
> >but about taxonomic phonemes (the crucial
> >structuralist and descriptivist evidence for this
> >comes from reports of speaker reactions in learning
> >to use an orthography based on taxonomic
> >phonemes).)
>
>I'd like to follow up on this, but I fear this is not the right mailing
>list.  Nor do I wish to 'talk' with Dan (alone) by email, since it would be
>interesting to hear more opinions (assuming there are still many lexical
>phonologists out there, since OT seems to have taken over :-().  Is anyone
>aware of a more suitable forum?
>
>      Mike Maxwell
>      Linguistic Data Consortium
>      maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


mcginnis at ucalgary.ca