Primitives et naturalité

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.Brandao de Carvalho J. Primitives et naturalité. In: Langages, 31ᵉ année, n°125, 1997. Nouvelles phonologies, sous la direction de Bernard Laks . pp. 14-34