Is There a Universal Phonetic Alphabet?

Abstract

phonology.1 One salient difference has to do with the directness of the relationship between phonological information in the lexicon and surface phonetics. Clearly the 'phonological rules' which the generativists use to relate deep and surface phonetic representations (cf. SPE) are very much more powerful than the rules stating the relationships between, e.g., Hockett's 'phonemes' (1942), or Harris's 'morphophonemes' (1951, ch. 14), and their 'allophones'. I have criticized Chomsky-Hallean 'phonological rules' elsewhere (Sampson 1970); I do not wish to discuss the issue further here (although see fn. 35 below). Then there are two points connected with Chomsky's distinction between 'competence' and 'performance'. First, the generativists believe that physically observable pronunciations are only approximations to ideal target pronunciations, and that the pronunciations relevant for linguistic analysis are the ideal targets rather than the observed approximations. Bloomfield did not draw this distinction. Second (a closely related point), Bloomfield took it for granted that a phonetic transcription should represent the observable stages of the speech chain-particu