Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

assumption that in providing a complete account of the representation of a specific
phonological process in the grammatical competence of a speaker of a given language,
we will also necessarily achieve a comprehensive account of the range of typological
regularities observed crosslinguistically in the patterning and attestation of all related
phonological processes. This postulate, I am arguing, is both fallacious and
counterproductive, as it places logically out of bounds precisely the information
necessary for a full accounting of the crosslinguistic facts. By contrast, the empirical
coverage of the phonologization approach (often based on information either irrelevant or
unavailable to the individual speaker in synchrony) in accounting for phonological
typology underscores this point. As evidenced throughout this study, there is simply no
reason to assume that the same body of information necessarily explains both why set X
and only set X variants of a phonological process exists, and also how a given speaker of
a language acquires and implements a single member of that set X. Put more directly, a
speaker certainly needs to know that his or her language contains a given pattern, but the
assumption that he or she must also know why his or her language contains that pattern
(in functionalist terms) is not at all obviously supported.
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