Substance Free Phonology
Charles Reiss
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003087
August 2016
Imagine a theory of phonology that makes no reference to well-formedness, repair, contrast, typology, variation, language change, markedness, `child phonology’, faithfulness, constraints, phonotactics, articulatory or acoustic phonetics, or speech perception. What remains in such a phonological theory constitutes the components of the Substance Free Phonology (SFP) model I will sketch here. My task thus involves not only justifying the exclusion of all those domains, but also arguing that something remains that is worthy of the name `phonology’. In support of the latter task, I’ll provide some positive examples of recent research in SFP.