Poznan09
External evidence and Government Phonology
Markus Alexander Poechtrager
Standard Government Phonology (GP; Kaye, Lowenstamm & Vergnaud 1990, Kaye 1995) subscribes to the Phonological Epistemological Principle: "The only source of phonological knowledge is phonological behaviour" (where "behaviour" usually refers to the cooccurrence and alternation of linguistic elements, i.e. the classic definition of internal evidence). At first glance, this seems to draw a very strict dividing line between internal evidence (probative) and external evidence (irrelevant).
In this course I want to go through the reasoning behind the Phonological Epistemological Principle and the consequences that seem to follow from it. Such an assessment needs to be clear about several issues:
* Why was something as strict as the Phonological Epistemological Principle set up in the first place? Its job (in part) is to fulfill the old Chomskian requirement that we should use the best available evidence when evaluating theoretical claims, but does that really imply that external evidence should never play any role?
* What exactly counts as phonological behaviour?
* What kind of linking assumptions (Zwicky 1980) exist between external and internal evidence, i.e. how can evidence of the former kind be validated, under which conditions can it be used? For example, can it be used to evaluate theories in the absence of any decisive (internal) phonological evidence?
* How does language acquisition (for example) relate to phonological behaviour? What problems are there in assessing acquisition data (cf. the discussion in Hale & Reiss 2008) and what do they say about phonological knowledge?
* What about language games, historical change or speaker tasks (e.g. syllabification tasks), which are very much unlike ordinary phonological operations what's their relevance?
* Furthermore, unlike other approaches to phonology, GP has no level of linguistically relevant phonetics, hence any argument resting on so-called phonetic grounding or the like also counts as external and requires discussion (for a wealth of arguments why phonology cannot be based on phonetics, cf. Hammarberg 1976, Kaye 1989, Ploch 1999).
Those and related questions will be the topic of this course, which is less about particular claims from external evidence but more about its general justification.
Useful (though certainly not required!) reading
Katarzyna Dziubalska Kołaczyk (ed). 2001. Constraints and Preferences. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hale, Mark & Charles Reiss. 2008. The Phonological Enterprise. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hammarberg, Robert. 1976. The metaphysics of coarticulation. Journal of Phonetics 4. 353363.
Harris, John. 1999. Release the captive coda: the foot as a domain of
phonetic interpretation. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11. 165194.
Harrison, Phil. 1999. Phon-something: a clarification. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11. 195206.
Kaye, Jonathan. 1989. Phonology: a cognitive view. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Kaye, Jonathan. 1992. Do you believe in magic? The story of s+C se-
quences. SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics & Phonetics 2. 293313.
Kaye, Jonathan. 1995. Derivations and interfaces. In: Durand, Jacques & Katamba, Francis (eds.). Frontiers of Phonology: Atoms, Structures, Derivations. London, New York: Longman. 289332.
Kaye, Jonathan. 2000: A Users Guide to Government Phonology (GP).
Unpublished Ms.
Kaye, Jonathan. 2005. GP, Ill have to put your flat feet on the ground. In: Hans Broekhuis, Norbert Corver, Riny Huybregts, Ursula Kleinherz, Jan Koster (eds.). Organizing Grammar. Studies in Honor of Henk van Riemsdijk. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 283288.
Kaye, Jonathan. Under review. Canadian Raising, eh? To be published in: Canadian Journal in Linguistics.
Kaye, Jonathan, Jean Lowenstamm & Jean-Roger Vergnaud. 1990. Constituent structure and government in phonology. Phonology 7: 2. 193231.
Ladefoged, Peter. 1989. Representing Phonetic Structure. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 73. 182.
Penke, Martina & Anette Rosenbach. 2007. What counts as evidence in linguistics: the case of innateness. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Ploch, Stefan. 1999. Nasals on My Mind. The Phonetic and the Cognitive
Approach to the Phonology of Nasality. Ph.D. thesis, School of Oriental &
African Studies, University Of London.
Skousen, Royal. 1975. Substantive Evidence in Phonology. The Evidence from Finnish and French. The Hague, Paris: Mouton de Gruyter.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1980. "Internal" and "External" Evidence in Linguistics. In: Peter D. Asquith & Ronald Giere (eds.). PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol. 1980, Volume Two: Symposia, Special Sessions, and Invited Lectures. 598604.
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