1 From The Sound Pattern of English : Phonetic and Phonological Representation ( 1968 ) Noam

. . . [T]he phonetic transcription is related by the rules of the phonological component to a string of formatives with labeled bracketing which represents the surface syntactic structure of the sentence. We will now examine in some detail the manner in which these formatives are represented in a linguistic description. Many of the formatives are lexical items, the “roots” or “stems” of traditional grammar. A grammar must include a list of these items, for part of a speaker’s knowledge of his language consists of knowing the lexical items of the language. It is by virtue of this knowledge that the native speaker is able to distinguish an utterance in normal English from an utterance such as Carnap’s “Pirots karulized elatically” or from Carroll’s jabberwocky, which conform to all rules of English but are made up of items that happen not to be included in the lexicon of the language. The representations of the individual items in the lexicon must incorporate the knowledge which makes it possible for the speaker to utilize each lexical item in grammatically correct sentences. This includes certain syntactic information which the speaker must have. For example, he must know that a particular item is a noun and that it belongs to a large number of intersecting categories such as “animate” or “inanimate,” “human” or “nonhuman,” “feminine” or “masculine.” Since the only question of interest here is whether or not a given item belongs to the category in question, it is natural to represent this information by means of a binary notation: cow, for example, would be specified as [+animate, −human, +feminine]. In addition to these syntactic features, each lexical entry must contain specified features which determine the phonetic form of the item in all contexts. We shall call these the “phonological features.” The phonological features cannot be chosen arbitrarily, for the phonological component would then have to include a huge number of ad hoc rules of the type