Author(s): Hassan A. Durgauhee
E-mail: hassan@ling.ed.ac.uk
What is the most adequate way to describe the level of mental representation which exists immediately prior to the physical occurrence of an utterance? In addressing this, the question to be answered in the projected thesis, I make two starting assumptions. Firstly, I assume that any principled description of this level of mental representation must obviously aim to reflect psychological reality, being as free as possible from a priori bias towards potential applications such as speech synthesis/recognition, or any such partiality as to the particular form that phonological descriptions should take (i.e. whether they should be rule- or constraint-based, featural or gestural, `declarative' or `procedural', and so on). Secondly, I assume that all potential answers to this question should be given a fair hearing. In this paper, then, I shall consider just one such answer, namely the Representational Hypothesis. In my discussion, I shall point out a number of problems with Burton-Roberts' proposal, compare his view with another which has become prominent in recent years, and suggest how the two might be integrated and thus contribute towards an improved theory of phonetic representation.
Paper: Postscript (357392 bytes)