Blackwell Reference Online

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Over the years, Chomsky has encouraged us to ask, how is it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief, personal, and limited are nevertheless able to know as much as they do? How does the child come to master a complex, abstract system like language when the evidence available to the child is so sparse? This question is one of the great scientific puzzles of our time, and phonology is only one of the many disciplines that have attacked the problem, but found the answer elusive. The field is large, inter-disciplinary, and relatively young. Each discipline generates its own theories, ideologies, and heated debates, but this theoretical diversity is warranted by the complexity of the puzzle, for language is indeed complex, and many descriptions are possible for each phenomenon. Language acquisition data are at times like Rorschach ink blots. Phoneticians see in a CVCV transcription (already multiply removed from the original object) evidence for articulatory primitives, gestures, or mandibular open-close frames, while phonologists look at the same ink configuration, see abstract units, and debate about syllables, moras, features, nodes, and feet. Inherent descriptive equivalence or indeterminancy is compounded because of the dual nature of a representation that is input to the two different systems of phonology and phonetics. To the descriptive problems, one must add ... log in or subscribe to read full text