The respective advocates of Optimality Theory, traditional derivational Generative Phonology and other prominent phonological theories such as Declarative Phonology and Government Phonology have seemingly always taken it for granted that the phonological symbols on which each of these theories relies have identical meanings. Although somewhat limited by the notoriously oligarchical sociology of the field, this situation has nonetheless led to a significant amount of cross-theoretical comparison which has been oversimplistic in both formal and functional terms (e.g. Clements 1992; Roca 1997). Based on the four assumptions that (i) phonological symbols stand for predicates, (ii) phonological symbols are used unambiguously within any theory, though not necessarily across them, (iii) phonology is a natural science, and about things in this, the natural world, and (iv) the phonetic characteristics of utterances are not overdetermined, the simple purpose of this paper is to provide a preliminary illustration of how an explicitly formalised Phonological Semantics will indicate that phonological symbols emphatically do not have the same semantic content across frameworks which are radically different, and that the consequence of the possible incommensurability of the clutch of extant phonological theories is one which must be addressed with some urgency, since each can be seen to be making very particular claims about the logical, philosophical, and neurological status of phonological representation.
To download this paper, please return to Proceedings of the 1997 Postgraduate Conference