Essays on the Sound Pattern of English

This book is a collection of readings in phonological theory with special reference to English. The essays it contains are all concerned to a significant extent with discussion and criticism of the theory of phonology developed by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle in their monograph The Sound Pattern of English. Our aim in compiling this collection has been to alleviate a tendency for important papers in recent linguistics either to get overtaken by the speed at which the discipline progresses and hang suspended in a semi-published limbo while professional linguists refer to them in mimeo-graphed form and students never see them at all, or to get scattered far and wide in the vast and growing linguistic literature and thus become difficult to track down in any but the largest libraries. Many of the selections included here, while having great value for any student of English phonology, have been available up to now only in informal duplicated or working-paper form, though frequently referred to in print, or have appeared in compara-tively inaccessible publications. Others are entirely new contributions to the field.
We see Essays on The Sound Pattern of English as being of value to anyone teaching or studying English or general linguistics who wishes to make a serious study of current phonological theory. It is designed to serve both as a reference anthology of permanent value to the specialist, and as a reader for students of linguistics at graduate or undergraduate level.