Re ections on On the Phonetic Rules of Russian

At a time when ideas of how phonology ought to be done are clearly changing it is important to understand the kinds of thing that induce fundamental change in our science In that spirit I would like to examine here what we know and equally what we think we know about another major change that took place within the relatively recent past in our thinking about sound structure My theme is the role which is actually played in scienti c change by intellectual argument as opposed to more opportunistic considerations and I am afraid my ultimate conclusions are less idealistic than one might wish A sort of creation myth that I grew up with about the history of phonology has struc turalists in America and also in Europe concentrating on the discovery of phonemes as minimal units of surface contrast through the s s and s Then at the end of the s Morris Halle presented some data from Russian concerning voicing assimilation from which it was clear that such a notion of phonemes was indefensible and led inevitably to loss of generality As a result with allowances for entrenched prejudices and the time neces sary to re tool phonologists re oriented their attention toward the previously marginalized domain of morphophonemics and phonemics was replaced by generative phonology To what extent does that picture correspond to reality Let us look at the facts historical and linguistic Halle s argument was rst presented at the LSA meeting Halle Thanks to the fact that in that era meetings of the Linguistic Society were su ciently small that minutes could be kept showing who attended who participated in discussion etc we know that in the session at which this paper was given about people including many of the major names in American Structuralist linguistics of the period were present in the audience The original text is no longer available but the form of the argument was apparently the same as that which rst appears in print two years later in The Sound Pattern of Russian