The Sound Pattern of English, SPE

SPE, as the Sound Pattern of English is commonly known by linguists, remains a milestone in the field, even though most of its main theses were long ago abandoned by both authors, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle.

It is a testament to its quality and depth, that admirers and detractors alike refer to it by the acronym of its title rather than, more standardly, by the names of the authors and the date of publication. Remarkably, it was only published in paperback long after both authors had moved on. One SPE thesis which has not been abandoned is the notion of a ‘possible word’. SPE gives the example of BNIK as a completely impossible word in English, though possible in many languages, and almost possible in Greek and Russian. Another thesis which is still adhered to by many phonologists is the notion of phonological structures being DERIVED, rather than concatenated or chained together. An important part of the reasoning here is the fact that in English and most languages which do not use tone to distinguish one word from another, there are contours of rhythm or stress. The two properties, of segmental / syllabic structure and rhythm, may be organised in rather different ways. In English, as in many other languages, the rhythm is partly organised from right to left, on the third syyllable from the right in Austria, Australia, and California.

My three child friendly notables, William Holder, John Thelwall and Alexander Melville Bell, critically exploited the notion of possible words, without using anything like this term. The idea was taken much further in SPE. This was on the basis of new evidence from a large number of languages and their histories, almost all unknown to European and American scholars until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

From features to phonemes

Like Holder before them, but using a new and much more precise terminology, Chomsky and Halle propose that the phonemes are defined by the features, rather than the features being just their taxonomic attributes. This order of definition is still crucially relevant for the study of children’s speech.

By a taxonomic approach, as espoused by the International Phonetic Association, there are eleven points at which the airflow can be constricted, the vocal chords, the lips, and nine others in between.

SPE recognises that no language exploits more than a few of these in any given ‘system’ the stops or the fricatives. English is typical is exploiting three points in the stops, P, T, and K, and four in the fricatives, F, S, SH and TH. So SPE proposes a more abstract but more parsimonious model with just four features to define articulatory place. To accommodate the TH phoneme in thin, SPE proposes a negative valuation with respect to a feature which it calls ‘strident’, contrasting this with a positive valuation with respect to F in fin, S in sin, SH in shin.

By the SPE system, features are either on or off. This was, as it remains, a quite reasonable assumption, given that this is how the nervous system works. Nerves are either activated or not.

SPE makes it possible to describe a large range of what are commonly called ‘processes‘ – like ‘stopping’ or saying sea as TEA by reversing the value of the feature which SPE calls [Continuant] or ‘fronting’ or saying key as TEA by reversing the values of two of the four place features.

Rhythm or word stress or ‘metricality’

As one aspect of what is known as the ‘metricality’ of sound structure in contrast to its ‘segmentality’, word stress has complex effects across the whole range of speech acquisition – as shown by Nunes (2002) up until the age of seven or eight. SPE gives the first full account of English word stress, as a universal property of all English words, obvious in those with two syllables or more, and as much a part of an English word as the phonemes. Before SPE, it was often said that English stress varied randomly, as in Canada, loaned from Mohawk and Iroquois, spaghetti from Italian, and vindaloo, from various South Indian languages which had themselves loaned a form like vinho d’alho (wine of garlic) presumably from Portuguese. In Canada the stress on the first syllable; in spaghetti it is on the second; in vindaloo it is on the final syllable. Until SPE, the basis of the metricality remained mysterious. John Thelwall described it in terms of ‘cadences’, stretching the meaning of the musical term. Alexander Melville Bell suspected that an account was possible. SPE provided the first such account.

Defects

One defect of SPE is that its descriptive power is over-rich. In many cases it is as easy or even easier to describe things which do not happen or only happen very rarely than it is to describe things which are very common. For instance, key by ‘fronting’ as TEA is common. But tea as KEY is rare. And the lip action in pea is barely involved at all. Of six logically possible substitutions, all easily defined by reversing the values of two features, only one is commonly attested. This is not perspicuously captured by a reversal of two feature values, rather than one.

As shown by Nunes (2002), in a way consistent with the  proposal here, there is a more perspicuous account of fronting by a developmental failure with respect to what Diana Archangeli (1984) calls ‘alphabet formation‘.

In child speech ‘stopping’ – saying sea as TEA is common, but the opposite is uncommon in child speech. The unusual case of tea as SEA is known as ‘spirantisation’ from the old term ‘spirant’ for what is now generally known as a ‘fricative’. But spirantisation is common in adult phonology, as exampled in English by electricity from electric with a K sound turning into an S sound. This is discussed in depth in SPE.

I don’t yet have an account for the inverse phenomena with respect to spirantisation in adult phonology and stopping in child phonology. But there may be an account from the ordering in the process of alphabet formation. This may work differently in the two areas.

Another defect of SPE is its assumption that English as spoken today recapitulates much of the history of the language from the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer. This, as shown by Paul Kiparsky, is just not evidenced. And historical forms are unlearnable. The notion of historical recapitulation is quite different from the hypothesis by the proposal here that children’s acquisition of language as such recapitulates the evolution of language in the human species.

Still a milestone

When SPE was written, its authors had no way of tracking down the practioner linguists, Holder, Thelwall and Bell, whose work in some ways prefigured SPE because of some shenanigans in the early 1900s. But thanks to SPE, there is now lively research in all of SPE’s main areas, all matters of great concern for clinical linguistics, particularly the duality of metricality and segmentality.

The authors

Chomsky has written over 100 books and many more articles, most recently Chomsky and others (2023). Chomsky is the world’s most widely cited living author, honoured by twenty eight honorary doctorates. Part of Chomsky’s originality was to recognise how remarkable it is that speech and language are commonly mastered over about ten years without help or instruction (other, it might be said, than about what not to say). Much of his argument has always been driven by conceptual necessity or considerations of economy, simplicity and parsimony.

Halle was originally trained as an engineer. In the late 1940s when it seemed that sound recording would make it possible to synthesise speech by splicing together snippets of recorded speech, he was recruited by Roman Jacobson to join his team with Gunnar Fant to produce their pathbreaking, Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their Correlates, which showed how difficult speech synthesis would be. It unknowingly resurrected the notion of phonemes defined by their features, rather than the other way round. Halle is now known mainly for his theory of Distributed Morphology, with morphological forms entered into representations throughout the course of derivations.