Lamb's 'non-linearity' vs. Chomsky's 'loss of generality'

Response by Sydney Lamb to a post by me asking about Chomsky’s objections to the abstraction of phonemes from language data. Funknet discussion list:

The particular analysis which interests me is one I found in a historical retrospective by Fritz Newmeyer and others “Chomsky’s 1962 programme for linguistics” (in Newmeyer’s “Generative Linguistics – A Historical Perspective”, Routledge, 1996, and apparently also published in “Proc. of the XVth International Congress of Linguists”.)

Newmeyer is talking mostly about Chomsky’s “Logical basis of linguistic theory” paper (presented at the Ninth Int. Congress of Linguists?) Chomsky’s argument as he presents it focused largely on phonology, and was controversial because it attacked what was at the time “considered a fundamental scientific insight: the centrality of the contrastive function of linguistic elements.” …According to Newmeyer “part of the discussion of phonology in ‘LBLT’ is directed towards showing that the conditions that were supposed to define a phonemic representation (including complementary distribution, locally determined biuniqueness, linearity, etc.) were inconsistent or incoherent in some cases and led to (or at least allowed) absurd analyses in others.” Most importantly the interposition of such a “phonemic level … led to a loss of generality in the formulation of the rule-governed regularities of the language.” …

Chomsky was correct in pointing out that some of the criteria in use at that time for defining phonemic representations were less than airtight, but his alternative phonological proposals were even more faulty. I analyzed every one of his arguments against the “classical phonemic level” (e.g. the Russian obstruents, the English vowel length difference before voiced vs. voiceless syllable-final consonants) and found flaws in every one, some of them rather egregious. Conclusion: His arguments about “loss of generality” are wrong – every one of them.

For example, perhaps his most celebrated argument concerns the Russian obstruents. He correctly pointed out that the usual solution incorporates a loss of generality, but he misdiagnosed the problem. The problem was the criterion of linearity. He stubbornly holds on to this criterion, although it really is faulty, and comes up with a solution for the Russian obstruents that obscures the phonological structure. I showed (in accounts cited below) that by relaxing the linearity requirement we get an elegant solution while preserving “centrality of contrastive function of linguistic elements”.

The errors in Chomsky’s arguments (together with defense of “centrality of contrastive function of linguistic elements”) have been pointed out it a number of publications, including:

Lamb, review of Chomsky …. American Anthropologist 69.411-415 (1967).

Lamb, Prolegomena to a theory of phonology. Language 42.536-573 (1966) (includes analysis of the Russian obstruents question, as well as a more reasonable critique of the criteria of classical phonemics).

Lamb and Vanderslice, On thrashing classical phonemics. LACUS Forum 2.154-163 (1976).

See also the discussion in Lamb, Linguistics to the beat of a different drummer. First Person Singular III. Benjamins, 1998 (reprinted in Language and Reality, Continuum, 2004).