Abstract
According to Hooper (1976: 5), the theory of natural generative phonology places the strongest possible constraints on abstractness in phonological descriptions. She claims that ‘the major advantage of natural generative theory over previous theories is that it gives a realistic representation of linguistic competence by constraining the theory to allow only a small subset of the grammars allowed by the unconstrained theory’ (xi). She claims further that the subset of grammars which are consistent with the constraints of natural generative phonology (NGP) accurately represent a speaker's knowledge of his language. This paper considers how vowel harmony rules in languages such as Turkish and Hungarian would be formulated in NGP. It is argued that the analyses required by NGP for these and similar vowel harmony languages do not represent the internalized knowledge of speakers of these languages and, therefore, that such vowel harmony systems provide strong evidence against NGP.
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