The phoneme in generative phonology and in phonological change

Abstract

Generative phonology comes out of phonemic and morphonemic theory, except that it gives up the phonemic level. Since the early 1970s, a number of attempts have been made to bring the phoneme back. One of the earliest and strongest was that of Schane (1971). His claim was that features which are phonemic in some enviomments but nonphonemic in others tend to get lost in the latter but are preserved and accentuated in the former. We find a number of conceptual and factual problems with Schane's case. Most importantly, the phonemic/nonphonemic distinction is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for feature loss in the examples cited by Schane or in other parallel cases. In the article, we give a different explanation of these phenomena: Feature loss, like all sound change, is determined by phonetic conditions and not formal ones (such as the phonemic/nonphonemic distinction). This, together with other arguments given in various publica-tions, supports our theory of 'broad phonology'. © 1988 John Benjamins Publishing Company.