Contenu du sommaire : Nouvelles phonologies, sous la direction de Bernard Laks

Along with an introduction to the present issue of Langages, the paper offers an analysis of the contemporary field of phonology. From the seventies up to now, different phonological approaches and frameworks are examined : autosegmental and metrical phonology, natural, lexical, dependency, government and geometry feature models are analysed as are more contemporary theories such as connectionism, harmonic phonology and optimality theory. The configurational and dynamical hypotheses that organise current phonological research are presented and discussed.

The aim of this paper is to show how naturalness considerations are crucial criteria for evaluating the recent theories of primitives and infrasegmental structure. Concerning primitives, it is argued that, though unary elements are to be preferred to binary features on the basis of segmental markedness, the markedness of these elements remains an arbitrary and circular notion in all frameworks. An attempt is made to formulate a theory where elements and their markedness value are deducible objects. Concerning the second point, it is shown that phonological processes are more naturally accounted for if we assume universal principles and language-specific structures, which runs counter to the claims of both geometric and government-based approaches.

This paper is a non-derivational approach to phonology, based upon constraints. Declarative Phonology uses only one level of representation, discards re-writing rules and comes within the framework of the Lexicalist Programme. A new analysis of intrusive r in English shows the necessary integration of Declarative Phonology into an approach based upon principles and parameters : there exists a phonological organisation and the very principles of this organisation are supposed to constrain constraints.

In Optimality Theory (ОТ ; Prince & Smolensky 1993), linguistic structures emerge from grammatical constraints interaction which assigns to the standard notions of markedness, marked structure, unmarked structure and implicational markedness a precise formal status. This conception is explored in the domain of Prosodie Morphology. The article presents first the basics of the analysis, then formal descriptions of syllabic and morphological aspects of reduplicative patterns. Finally, the theory is tested on the analysis of apparently complex morphophonological dependencies in the reduplicative pattern of Makassarese, an Austronesian language.

Phonology has long been a cumulative science, but this not so clearly the case today. Since the sixties, generative phonology has deliberately tried to hide its grounding in the structuralist phonology. As a consequence, contemporary phonologists who try to uncover the historical roots of their actual practice have difficulties with the so called post-bloomfieldian heritage. Through a precise reanalysis of the history of generative phonology, the paper focuses on concepts and hypotheses which are of first importance for contemporary research showing the continuity between ancient and new frameworks. Rethinking phonology as a cumulative science appears as being a condition for its current development.