Spanish Phonology and Morphology . Experimental and Quantitative Perspectives
نویسندگان
چکیده
In his acknowledgments (p. xii), the author, a professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University, attributes his conceptualization of linguistics to Joan Bybee (1989), Bruce Derwing (Derwing and Skousen, 1989), and Skousen (1989, 1992, 1995), and these influences are certainly evident in this volume. Eddington (henceforth E.) has amassed an impressive personal bibliography in the area of phonology and morphology (Eddington, 1992, 1994, 1996a,b, 1998, 1999, 2000a,b, 2001a,b, 2002a,b, 2004a,b; Eddington and Lestrade, 2002). In his introduction, E. explains that he had considered adding the subtitle ‘A View from Left Field’ to the book (p. xiii) because this baseball metaphor suggests something that ‘‘. . . belongs to heterodox, unconventional, nontraditional ideas located far from the mainstream . . .’’ (p. xiii). To be sure, E.’s approach to Spanish phonology and morphology is unorthodox, at least in some circles. E.’s methodology is quantitative and experimental. What is distinctive about E.’s approach is his focus on how actual Spanish speakers process language in real time (p. xv) in a field long dominated by generative-based theory with its emphasis on an ideal speaker–hearer and mechanics and formalism (p. xiv). E. begins his first chapter (‘The psychological status of linguistic analyses’, pp. 1–21), an earlier version of which appeared as Eddington (1996b), with a brief review of the vast literature on the psychological status of linguistic analyses, a frequently debated topic in the 1970s. The author notes that since that original interest in this issue, only philosophers of language and the occasional experimental linguist have written about it. Rather than continue to try to resolve the matter, E. notes that linguists have more or less ignored it, instead, devoting their time and effort to the many new linguistic theories that have emerged in the past quarter century (p. 1). After a review of linguistics since Leonard Bloomfield’s behaviorism and Noam Chomsky’s rationalism, the author addresses important issues such as empiricality, falsifiability, methodology (autonomous versus non-autonomous), the evidence base, and the relationship between formal and empirical analyses. After his review of the literature on the psychological reality of phonological theories, E. notes that their psychological reality has been questioned on several grounds (pp. 20–21): (1) truth versus reality, i.e., there is no way to distinguish between theories that possess psychological validity and those that are mere notational constructs; (2) most contemporary linguistic analyses are non-empirical, hence, they are not falsifiable; (3) many theories are established with little or no recourse to the speakers of the language; and (4) most theories derive from a very www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua Lingua 117 (2007) 1821–1825
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