The Sound Pattern of English

Uncommon card · No. 113697

The Sound Pattern of English (SPE) is a work on phonology by linguists Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, originally published in 1968. As the first exposition of the framework of generative phonology, it was the authoritative text of the field for most phonologists in the decade following its publication. In SPE, Chomsky and Halle present a view of phonology as a component of generative grammar, alongside syntax and semantics. A language's phonology is said to consist of a series of computations, termed phonological rules. The phonological rules relate the output of the syntactic component—the "underlying representation"—to a "surface" (or "phonetic") representation, which in turn serves as the input to the articulatory mechanisms that lead to speech. Phonological rules operate on a set of universal phonological categories termed distinctive features, which are the minimal building blocks of phonological representation. In the United States, SPE revolutionized the field of phonology, replacing...

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