On some recent claims in phonological theory

Abstract

In 1962, on the occasion of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, an article by Morris Halle (1962) appeared in the special issue ofWord, and Noam Chomsky (1964) appeared before a plenary session of the Congress to defend some remarks which had previously been distributed in thePreprints.¹These two papers were perhaps intended as a sort of one-two punch to knock old-fashioned linguistics out of the ring; at any rate, on matters of phonology, their claims and assertions, if all wholly true, would tend to make all phonological work impossible on any known lines (curiously, they fail to reveal their own methods).