From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: phonology question
Date: 10 Sep 92 17:03:45 GMT
Reply-To: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com
Organization: Research & Technology

In article 92Sep9104949@sapir.cog.jhu.edu, anderson@sapir.cog.jhu.edu (Steve Anderson) writes:
>I'd stay out of this, except that I'm somehow being blamed for leading
>Richard Goerwitz into talk about "anthropomorphic" alternations. An
>interesting notion, that....but Baudouin's term, to which I referred
>in a summary of his 1895 "Versuch" is "anthropophonic". 

Thanks for correcting that, Steve.  Sometimes, when I'm on my soapbox, I
confuse phonology with theology.  :-)

>Baudouin lived long enough (1845-1929) to have said a lot of things,
>and to have used a lot of words - many of which were conscious
>neologisms that he later regretted. The distinctions made in the
>Versuch, however, and the relations discussed there among different
>types of alternation, still seem to me a valuable contribution to
>understanding. And if the domain of the Natural Phonology notion of
>"process" is equivalent to "anthopophonics", at least as I understand
>the scope of that term, its explanatory ambitions are somewhat more
>modest than I had thought.

I don't mean to equate Natural Phonology with Baudouin's descriptions of
anthropophonics (or physiophonetics), only to draw a correspondence in
domain.  Much of what we do in phonological theory is Baudouin's legacy.
It is interesting that Baudouin's Versuch ("An Attempt at a Theory of 
Phonetic Alternations"--a version of which appears in Stankiewicz's
reader) approached phonology in terms of classifying phonetic alternations
into two classes.  Psychophonetic alternations (morphonology) involved
two distinct phonemes, and physiophonetic ones (phonology) involved but a single
phoneme.  Baudouin thought of phonemes as the most abstract phonemic level of
representation in a morpheme.  But his attempt at a classification led 
subsequent generations astray in that physiophonetics involves more than
alternations.  Baudouin said some things at the time which suggested that he
was aware of the problem, but that awareness never made it into phonological
theory until David Stampe's work.  Processes may or may not produce observable
phonetic alternations in a language.  They exist independently of alternations.

What I am drawing attention to here is the need for some kind of "phonotactic"
generalizations in a linguistic description.  Natural phonology explicitly 
rejects phonological filters of this sort, taking the view that Processes 
account for phonotactic generalizations.  Conventional phonology tends to
bifurcate phonology into those operations that govern alternations (phonological
rules) and those that do not (phonotactics, morpheme structure, etc.).  I
believe that the bifurcation can be traced back to Baudouin's attempt at
recognizing two types of alternation classes, even though one class was
governed by operations that went beyond alternations.  Subsequent generations
of linguists, needing to deal with data that had nothing to do with alternations,
invented an entirely new type of generalization out of whole cloth.

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Disclaimer:  Opinions expressed above are not those of my employer.

    Rick Wojcik   (rwojcik@atc.boeing.com)   Seattle, WA