Abstract

Phonology is becoming more ‘natural’. New schools of Natural Phonology and Natural Generative Phonology (not to be confused with each other) have arisen over the last fifteen years or so, as a reaction against the type of proposals made by Chomsky & Halle in The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky & Hale 1968), and it has become more and more common to formulate phonological arguments in terms of their ‘naturalness’, or to prefer one argument to another because the solution it presents is more ‘natural’. Unfortunately, the term ‘natural’ as it appears in such statements is not well-defined.

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