Radical Substance Free Phonology.

David Odden’s “Radical substance-free phonology and feature learning” (Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique; published online by Cambridge University Press 27 September 2022; Open Access) boggles my mind. The Abstract is fairly unintelligible to me, since it assumes a long steeping in the relevant terminology that I have managed to escape: This article argues that phonological features have no substantive properties, instead, segments are assigned features by learning strategies set to the task of devising a computational system for a phonology that is consistent with the requirements of UG. I address two problems for such a substance-free model. The first is the Card-Grammar problem, which has been suggested to argue for universal substantive features, on the premise that, otherwise, language data cannot be stored in a fashion necessary to correct learning errors. The Card Grammar problem disappears, in a suitably modular theory of mind with learned…

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