Chomsky and Halle's revolution in phonology

Chomsky and Halle's approach to phonological theory, as represented in their major work The sound pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968, henceforth SPE), represented a sharp break with the main currents of American linguistics that immediately preceded them. Nevertheless, some elements of the Jakobson-Halle approach to phonology were continued in generative phonology. In general terms, Chomsky and Halle's theory of generative phonology was a synthesis of Jakobson and Halle's theory of distinctive features and phonemic analysis, revised in the light of Chomsky's emphasis on formal explicitness, simplicity, and abstractness and autonomy of mental representations (Dresher 2005).

One aspect of Jakobson and Halle's theory that did not make it into SPE was the contrastive hierarchy. As discussed in the previous chapter, the atmosphere was not conducive to assigning a special role to contrastive specifications. One of the major points of difference between the older structuralist approach and generative phonology was the status of the taxonomic phoneme (Chomsky 1964), alluded to above in section 4.6. Classical generative phonology posits only two significant levels in the phonology: the underlying lexical, or ‘systematic phonemic’ level (known as the ‘morphophonemic’ level in structuralist theory), and the surface phonetic level (a level that was not recognized as a systematic level in structuralist phonology, following the arguments of Bloomfield 1933). Instead of a phonetic level, the neo-Bloomfieldians posited what Chomsky called the ‘taxonomic phonemic’ level, a level defined largely in terms of surface-oriented criteria designed to simplify the acquisition problem (see Dresher 2005 for discussion).