Generative phonology in the late 1940s

The spring issue of Language of 1949 brought a remarkable new paper to its readers on the behavior of morphophonemes, and the techniques that should be used to uncover them.1 This paper was entitled Automatic alternations, (Wells 1949) and was the work of a young professor at Yale University, Rulon S. Wells (1919-), who would much later in 1976 be president of the LSA. It tackled the question of how to deal with the fact that if we view the world from a phonemicist's perspective, we may want to speak about a single morpheme, like the plural /-z/ in English, having several distinct phonemic realizations, all of which are predictable from purely phonological information in the environment of the morpheme. Such generalizations are not the provenance of phonemics, of course, from a phonemic point of view but they are the responsibility of the linguist, for generalizations of this sort may constitute a large portion of a language's structure.2 In this paper, Wells introduces explicitly all of the reasoning that would characterize the heart of generative phonology: (i) underlying forms (which he calls basic forms ) which may be abstract, (ii) rules that derive surface (phonemic) forms from the underlying forms by rules that dynamically modify a segment in the rule's focus when it occurs in a particular phonological environment, (iii) the crucial character of rule ordering in some cases, and (iv) the necessity of intermediate forms in a derivation. Much of Wells' paper is thoroughly modern in conception, and we shall take the opportunity to go through it in some detail, because it foreshadows indeed, presents the dynamic and rule-based conception of generative phonology, and also because it directly addresses the question of how to relate rule-application with repairs of constraint violations, another topic that seems very contemporary in its perspective. The paper is largely organized into four parts. In the rst, Wells discusses the directionality inherent in some alternations; in the second, some dangers that arise from analyzing morphophonemic changes as having been causally triggered by violations of surface phonotactics an implicit criticism of some Sapir-inspired phonological description. In the third