Frontiers of Phonology: Atoms, Structures, Derivations

Abstract

Atoms, Structures, Derivations is a collection of essays that present a selective overview of recent trends in the linguistic analysis of sound structure. During the 1970S and the 1980s a fairly radical reconfiguration of the field of phonology took place, largely against the backdrop of Chomsky and Halle's The Sound Pattern of English (1968), hereafter abbreviated as SPE. The need to move away from the spartan approach to phonological representations advocated in SPE is now universally accepted but the range of solutions provided within current frameworks can be quite confusing for the non-specialist. Our aim is not to attempt to provide an exhaustive, panoramic coverage of the entire field, but rather to explore theoretical issues in three core areas of phonological theory from a number of different perspectives. The questions fall into three broad categories