Abstract:
Evolutionary Phonology attempts to explain the sound patterns that are recurrent in the world’s languages, including the distributions of sounds within segment inventories. Perhaps one of the strongest arguments made by Evolutionary Phonology concerns the nature of explanation. As Blevins (this volume) points out: ‘‘Generative Phonology and Optimality Theory both claim to rule out certain phonological systems and allow others by proposing innate aspects of phonological knowledge. But this level of explanation is at once too weak and too strong. It is too weak, because it fails to account for the high frequency of certain sound patterns and the rarity of others. And it is too strong because it incorrectly rules out attested sound patterns, which diachronic approaches correctly allow.’’ ( pg. 131)