11 The

The concept of the phoneme was central to the development of phonological theory. In the early twentieth century, phonological theory was all about the phoneme: how to define it, how to recognize it, how to discover it (see, for example, the articles selected for inclusion in Joos 1957 and Makkai 1972). The American structuralist term for phonology, phonemics, indicates to what extent the field was considered to be about the phoneme. Things have now changed. The phoneme, to all appearances, no longer holds a central place in phonological theory. Two recent and voluminous handbooks devoted to phonology, edited by Goldsmith (1995) and by de Lacy (2007), have no chapter on the phoneme. It is barely mentioned in the indexes. This does not mean that the phoneme plays no role in modern phonology; closer inspection reveals that the phoneme is far from dead. However, it is not much talked about, and when it is, it is more often to dispute its existence than to affirm it. Such a dramatic change in fortunes for a concept bears some looking into, and this chapter will be devoted to trying to understand what has happened to the phoneme in its journey into the twenty-first century, and what its prospects are for the future.