Preface

This book concerns a linguistic human compulsion – our tendency to assemble words that comprise internal patterns. All natural languages manifest such patterns – no known human tongue uses only single atomic sounds as words (e.g., “a o u” for ‘I love you’). Rather, words are intricately woven from smaller meaningless elements that form systematic patterns – we contrast god with dog and blog with globe. We begin spinning these webs in the womb, and we do so prodigiously, not only for familiar words but also for ones that we have never heard before. Our instinct to form those meaningless patterns is so robust that children have been shown to generate them spontaneously, even if they have witnessed no such patterns in their own linguistic community. In fact, people impose these patterns not only on their natural linguistic communication but also on their invented cultural technologies – reading and writing. This book seeks to unveil the basis of this human compulsion.

The human capacity to weave linguistic messages from patterns of meaningless elements (typically, speech sound) is phonology. Phonology has been the subject of much previous research, mostly in linguistics and psychology. For the most part, however, these efforts have proceeded in parallel lines across different disciplines, and as a result our understanding of the phonological mind remains fragmentary. Linguists (specifically, those in the field of formal phonology) have mostly concerned themselves with the structure of the phonological grammar, but the cognitive mechanisms underlying phonological patterns are rarely considered. Psychologists, for their part, have assumed without question that phonological patterns can be adequately handled by rather simple, non-specialized computational systems, but these investigations remain largely divorced from the progress made in formal phonological theory in recent decades. This book seeks to bridge the interdisciplinary divide and reconsider phonology in a new light.