An Emergent Phonology is a Transparent Phonology

Abstract

The role of an innate language faculty, or Universal Grammar, shaping the phonological com- ponent of grammar has been challenged in a growing body of recent research, in favour of Emergent Grammar, a “bottom-up” approach that assumes language structure is determined by using nonlinguistic human cognitive abilities to generalise over what is immediately ob- servable in language. This presentation briefly reviews some of the arguments in favour of an Emergentist approach (e.g. the non-universality of distinctive features, the challenge of map- ping sounds to features, etc.), then turns to what an Emergent phonology might look like: a morph-based lexicon with phonotactics and other selectional conditions determining which combination of relevant (observable) morphs is appropriate, and argues that the problem of phonological opacity disappears under Emergence.