Decisions and Mechanisms in Exemplar-based Phonology

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2005) Decisions and mechanisms in exemplar-based phonology Keith Johnson Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley 1. Introduction. Look at the leaf in figure 1. You can see a branching structure, an almost crystalline organization that could be described with a clean mathematical generative formalism. Now, raise your gaze only a little and you see a forest - diversity formed from interlaced systems of water and light, plant and insect. Figure 1. A leaf. We can approach language from these two perspectives also. Looking at the geometric regularities in the structure of the leaf is analogous to taking a structuralist linguistic framework inspired by mathematical/physical theories. Generative phonology (Chomsky & Halle, 1968) is the most prominent exemplar of this approach to language in the domain of phonology; adopting such familiar research strategies as the idealized speaker/hearer (analogous to the frictionless plane in elementary physics) and a variant of the formal language of symbolic logic to express generalizations observed in linguistic data.