Phonetic Explanations for Sound Patterns: Implications for Grammars of Competence

Phonological grammars try to represent speakers’ knowledge so that the ‘natural’ behavior of speech sounds becomes self-evident. Phonetic models have the same goals but have no psychological pretensions. Phonetic models succeed in explaining the natural behavior of speech, whereas phonological representations largely fail. The ‘phonetic naturalness’ requirement in phonological grammars should be re-examined and probably abandoned. INTRODUCTION The quest to find a representation of speech sounds that makes their behavior selfevident goes back at least 3 centuries (Amman 1694; Jespersen 1889; Key 1855) but has been most intense in the past 3 decades. Two approaches to “natural” representation have been developed in parallel, one, the “mainstream” phonological one which employs discrete linguistic primitives and at the same time purports to represent the knowledge of the native speaker (Chomsky & Halle 1968 [SPE]; Clements 1985; Goldsmith 1979; McCarthy 1988) and another, phonetic models which are expressed with continuous physical primitives (Fant 1960; Fujimura 1962; Ohala 1976; Scully 1990; Stevens 1971; Westbury & Keating 1985) but which do not pretend to reflect psychological structure. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2005)