Abstract

This book, written by two central figures of generative grammar, represent the culmination of some ten years work on phonological theory and specifically on the sound system of English. As such, it is of interest to anyone concerned with phonology in general no less than to the student of English. Their description of the phonological structure of modern English, while not claiming to be exhaustive, reveals the deep and hitherto largely uncharacterized, regularities underlying this system in at least two major areas: in the analysis of English stress, which is shown to be in large measure predictable at the level of both word and phrase; and in the account of vowel and consonant alternations in such cases as sane-sanity, deceive-deception, decide-decision, cone-conic and democrat-democracy respectively. Secondly the book constitutes a major contribution to general phonological theory. Thus, for example, the note of the phonological component of a generative grammar is viewed as the mapping of the abstract string of formatives that constitute the surface structure output of the syntax onto concrete phonetic space, via a series of carefully formalized rules; a clearly-defined, highly abstract view is taken of underlying phonological representations, which in turn are related in a non-arbitrary fashion to the actual phonetic output; and the choice of phonological primes is motivated in terms of certain crucial departures from the earlier set of distinctive features established by Roman Jakobson--to whom the book is dedicated. Thirdly, the book is of major importance for general linguistic theory, as it makes substantive contributions to areas such as: language change and the relation between diachrony and synchrony; the nature and ordering of grammatical rules ; or the key notion of the "cyclical" applications of rules--first introduced in this work in order to handle the assignment of English stress to words and phrases beyond the single-morpheme level, and by now a crucial feature of the transformational rules of generative syntax. In their preface, the authors describe The Sound Pattern of English as "an interim report on work in progress." That this is true is attested to by the debate now being waged on nearly every aspect of phonological theory by followers of Chomsky and Halle. The book has already given rise to considerable critical discussion, ranging from specific points such as the correctness of the particular set of distinctive features established by the authors, to far deeper issues concerning the abstractness of phonological representations, the inter-relation between phonology and the syntactic and semantic components of grammar, the place of phonetics within the field of linguistics. These very controversies should insure this book its place as a central text for all serious students of English, phonology, and language.--R. A.