Talk:The Sound Pattern of English/GA1

GA review

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Nominator: Kisseran (talk · contribs) 19:58, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

Reviewer: Kusma (talk · contribs) 21:26, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

Planning to review this over the next couple of days. —Kusma (talk) 21:26, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

Content and prose review

I will comment on anything I notice, but not all of my comments will be strictly related to the GA criteria, so not everything needs to be actioned. Feel free to push back if you think I am asking too much, and please tell me when I am wrong.

I appreciate any comments beyond the GA criteria as well, since I do intend to take this to FAC eventually. Kisseran (talk) 17:59, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Sorry about the delay! I will continue to do a full peer review then. I will go through everything before looking at your comments in detail. —Kusma (talk) 13:15, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

• Note that I am not a linguist. I am reading this with my naive mathematician/generally educated person hats on.
• Lead: Not necessarily something for you to do now, but it is a bit sad that generative phonology is just a redirect to generative grammar, whose full content on generative phonology appears to be that one approach is optimality theory.
  • Yes, I do intend on eventually de-redirecting that page. Kisseran (talk) 17:59, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• "In America, SPE revolutionized the field of phonology" only in America?
  • This is not to say that it wasn't influential elsewhere, but America is the only place where it clearly induced a scientific revolution. Kisseran (talk) 17:59, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• Will comment on completeness of lead / whether it is a good summary of the article later.
• Background: this is basically just mentioning who the authors are. The actual background of the book is then mentioned in the first sentences of the "Publication" section. Either rename this section to "Authors" and the following one to "Writing and Publication" or move content around so it fits the section headers.
  • Done. I'd modeled the structure off of Syntactic Structures, but your suggestion does make more sense. Kisseran (talk) 17:59, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• What is a "junior fellow"? At the very minimum link to Harvard Society of Fellows.
  • Linked. I'm not sure what kind of explication you're looking for. Kisseran (talk) 17:59, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• If I pretend to read only this article, I am a bit confused about where in Chomsky's life we are. He is apparently still in Harvard and does not yet have a PhD. We are told a lot about his background in Hebrew (is this very important for this article?) and little about him becoming the world's most famous linguist.
  • I was worried that adding more biographical information would detract from the focus of the article. Would you be expecting more biographical information? I can easily add more if desired. Chomsky's background in Hebrew is rather important for this article, since the book is based on his work on Hebrew, as mentioned in the article; conversely, his rise to becoming the world's most famous linguist is mostly incidental from his work in phonology. Kisseran (talk) 17:59, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• The Anderson reference could perhaps be combined with the "pre-publication manuscripts had already been circulating since 1964" since apparently this book was also first published in samizdat form among the insiders. (Or is this a dig at The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory not being published for 20 years?)
  • Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by "be combined". I've tried to organize the first two sections chronologically, so I've ordered the pre-publication information before the remark about the effect of the publication itself. Kisseran (talk) 17:59, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• General framework: "In SPE, Chomsky and Halle introduce the architecture of generative grammar" do they just give an introduction to generative grammar or is this the first book that talks about generative grammar? (that would kind of need to explain what the difference to Syntactic Structures is).
  • The former. I've rephrased to clarify. Kisseran (talk) 17:59, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• Phonological rules: I know that this is a quote, but in the explanation for the notation $A\rightarrow B/X\_\_Y$, what does $\_\_$ represent?
  • Formally, nothing in particular: it only serves the visual purpose of separating X from Y. Pedagogically, it is usually explained as the position of A between X and Y. Kisseran (talk) 17:59, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• The only place in the "Overview" section that makes the content seem specific to English is the section introduction. The subsections seem quite general (and there is nothing about the history of English vowels here). Does that reflect the book and/or its reception, or should there be more about the application of the general theory to English?
  • There's more than enough secondary coverage to write about it, yes, but the reception of the book is significantly more concentrated in its aspects of general phonological theory. The subject on my mind was how much technical detail I should go into for this kind of article, in keeping it focused on the book and not as a page on the history of phonology in general. Although I suppose in the grand scheme of thing the article really is not very long. Kisseran (talk) 17:59, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• Now reading "Distinctive features". More later! —Kusma (talk) 13:26, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• Is "Distinctive features are the units ..." generally considered true? (Some parts of the section are explicitly marked as being Chomsky and Halle's opinion, while others are not).
• Markedness: I do not completely understand how the example of a marking convention bypasses the mentioned problem. Do they make some arbitrary choice (probably informed by the language being English) which features are "marked" and which are not? Are [round] or [back] marked?
• Reception: nothing for you to do, just to confirm my own reading: is it correct to say that the positive reception was excited about a new theoretical framework, while the negative reception found that framework too removed from the actual study of English?
• Historiographical assessment: you could lose the second link to Syntactic Structures (in the quote). Other MOS:DUPLINK violations seem more acceptable.
• Instead of "a scientific revolution ... in the sense proposed by philosopher Thomas Kuhn" wouldn't it be easier to just say a paradigm shift?
• Subsequent developments: "In contrast to subsequent developments in generative phonology in the 1970s and 1980s, the framework of SPE is referred to as classical generative phonology" what is the context of this statement? Today? Or any time since the 1990s?
• This and the following sentence about Optimality Theory don't really say who thinks that.
• A couple of the "Works cited" are actually not cited (ChomskyHalle1965, Fought1980, van_der_HulstRitter2000, Kahn1976, KenstowiczKisseberth2022). You can find such occurrences for example with the user script User:Trappist the monk/HarvErrors.

First read through done. Very interesting to learn about phonology and a bit about Chomsky. —Kusma (talk) 13:15, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

Source spotchecks

I usually do these manually, but I am experimentally going to use a script instead. Let's see how it goes. —Kusma (talk) 13:22, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

This table lists 9 random passages from throughout the article (15.5% of 58 total passages). These passages contain 9 inline citations (15.3% of 59 in the article). Reference numbers refer to this revision. Generated with the Veracity user script. —Kusma (talk) 13:22, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

Reference #	Letter	Source	Archive	Status	Notes
Morris Halle was born in Liepāja, Latvia in 1923 and emigrated to the United States in 1940. After obtaining a linguistics degree at the University of Chicago, Halle studied under the Russian Prague school linguist Roman Jakobson.
4		Anderson 2021, p. 412.		ok	The link downloads a BibTeX file for me, perhaps not helpful for the general reader. DOI works fine. Content is ok if we believe the "Russian Prague school linguist", which is in the same book, but on different pages.
Also in 1959, Halle published The Sound Pattern of Russian
10		Halle 1959.		ok	primary source; I guess citation 11 is more interesting (but I couldn't access it).
SPE was first published by Harper & Row in 1968, although pre-publication manuscripts had already been circulating since 1964.
13	a	Koerner & Tajima 1986, p. 37.		ok	Fine (nice source; the list of reviews on the following two pages looks like a great resource too).
In SPE, Chomsky and Halle provide an introduction of the architecture of generative grammar, conceiving of language as a specialized, autonomous module in the sense of cognitive science. Language is further internally divided into constituent modules of phonology, semantics, and syntax. The phonological component consists of a sequence of phonological rules, which translate the syntactic structure at the output of the syntactic component into a phonetic representation, which can in turn be translated into a physical speech signal by the sensorimotor system.
23		Scheer 2011, pp. 398–399.		looks ok
Alphabetic symbols are used only as abbreviatory devices for bundles of distinctive features. For example, the symbol /i/ is a shorthand for the following feature matrix:
29		Chomsky & Halle 1968, p. 64.		⏳
Chomsky and Halle begin the final chapter of SPE, subtitled "prologue and epilogue", by stating that "the entire discussion in this book suffers from a fundamental theoretical inadequacy".
34		Chomsky & Halle 1968, p. 400.		⏳
Throughout the previous eight chapters, SPE had adopted a purely formal approach to phonology, in which formal notational length of a rule is said to directly reflect its degree of naturalness. However, this would lead to the absurd conclusion that any feature in a rule could be replaced by any other feature (e.g. replacing all instances of [+round] with [+consonantal]) without affecting the rule's naturalness. This approach also implies that feature values could be inverted (by interchanging all '+' values with '−' values) without affecting the rule's naturalness.
35		Anderson 2021, pp. 436–437.		⏳
In another one of the reviews, American linguist James McCawley praised the quality of argumentation in SPE as "unprecedented", adding that the investigations of the book "lead one deeper into the inner workings of the phonology of a language than any previous work". Despite rejecting many of SPE's specific conclusions, McCawley emphasized its methodological value, writing that his alternative proposals "could not even have been stated without the stimulation provided by SPE".
43		McCawley 1974, p. 50.		⏳
SPE was Chomsky's final notable work in phonology. After American involvement in the Vietnam War escalated in the 1960s, Chomsky increasingly involved himself in politics and stepped away from his linguistic interests with the exception of syntax, which he found most important.
50		Chomsky 2004, p. 82.		⏳

General comments and GA criteria

Good Article review progress box

Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV () 3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant () Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed