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Against formal phonology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Robert F. Port  and
Adam P. Leary
Robert F. Port*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
Adam P. Leary*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
*
Department of Linguistics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 [port@indiana.edu]
[adamlear@indiana.edu]
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Abstract

Chomsky and Halle (1968) and many formal linguists rely on the notion of a universally available phonetic space defined in discrete time. This assumption plays a central role in phonological theory. Discreteness at the phonetic level guarantees the discreteness of all other levels of language. But decades of phonetics research demonstrate that there exists no universal inventory of phonetic objects. We discuss three kinds of evidence: first, phonologies differ incommensurably. Second, some phonetic characteristics of languages depend on intrinsically temporal patterns, and, third, some linguistic sound categories within a language are different from each other despite a high degree of overlap that precludes distinctness. Linguistics has mistakenly presumed that speech can always be spelled with letter-like tokens. A variety of implications of these conclusions for research in phonology are discussed.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 81 , Issue 4 , December 2005 , pp. 927 - 964
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the Linguistic Society of America

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