CHARLES F. HOCKETT. A Manual of Phonology

Authors : C BAZELL

Pages : 121-123

View : 55 | Download : 11

Publication Date : 2014-08-21

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Like the other works of its author, this book is lucid, well-informed, and contains no more than a fair share of nonsense. As an example of nonsense may be taken the way in which the author sets up a principle of "phonetic realism" but concludes by saying: "There is one aspect of phonologiC analysis where the usual principle of phonetic realism, in the writer's opinion, must be not merely suspended but almost rever~ed. This is the search for junctures ... " What sort of a principle can this be? It runs like this: "Segments which are in complementation are nevertheless pho· netically distinct unless they resemble each other phonetically in such a way that the differences can be extracted fro~ the segments themselves and assigned, instead, to the environments, in some phonetically realistic way". (p. i 56) The word phonetically occurs here three times. In the first occurrence it would seem to be a misprint for phonemically; in the third oc~urrence it would seem to be redundant. With what non-phonetic reality could we be concerned?
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