Linguistic constructs often correspond to nothing concrete: Descriptivists’ zero morpheme, generativists’ trace, variationists’ null instantiation, and Columbia School’s null signal. These represent structural relations with no phonetic substance. Columbia School has posited, moreover, three types… read more
In his otherwise radically innovative linguistics (Columbia School), William Diver retained the classical phoneme, defined on the basis of contrastive distribution. He did so despite his rejection of most of the apparatus of traditional, descriptivist, and contemporary linguistics, and despite… read more