The Sound Pattern of English is a work on phonology (a branch of linguistics) by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle.

Chomsky and Halle present a view of phonology that, not surprisingly, fits in with the rest of Chomsky's early theories of language. Phonology is seen as a linguistic subsystem that takes the "surface structure" generated by the syntax, combined with phonological information stored in the lexicon, and yields the corresponding phonemic output.

The Sound Pattern of English is the model used to derive features for the etymon and reflex alphabets used in Lee Hartman's innovative phonological historical change model "Phono", as described in Phono (Version 4.0): Software for Modeling Regular Historical Sound Change (In Actas [del] VIII Simposio Internacional de Comunicación Social, Santiago de Cuba, 20-24 de enero del 2003 [Santiago de Cuba, 2003], I.606-609).

As is often done in phonology, Chomsky and Halle represent speech sounds as bundles of yes-or-no valued features (e.g. vocalic, high, back, anterior, nasal, etc..) The phonological component of each lexical entry is thought to consist of a linear sequence of these feature bundles. A number of context-sensitive rules coordinate the phonologies of successive words and phrases into the phonology of the entire sentence. These rules are allowed access to the tree structure that the syntax is said to output, which allows for rules that apply, for example, only at the end of a word, or only at the end of a noun phrase.

Editions

• Chomsky, Noam and Halle, Morris. The Sound Pattern of English. Harper & Row. New York: 1968.