Underlying Representations and Bantu Segmental Phonology
نویسنده
چکیده
For decades the assumption in traditional phonology has been that URs had the two functions of (i) capturing generalizations (“what’s in the language”) and (ii) capturing the speaker’s knowledge (“what’s in the head”). Bantu languages have been among those providing evidence of robust morphophonemic alternations of the sort captured by URs in generative phonology. In this paper I take a new look at some Bantu consonant alternations to ask whether URs are doing the effective job we have assumed. As I enumerated in Hyman (2015), various phoneticians and phonologists have expressed skepticism towards URs for one or more of the following reasons:
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