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The Sound Pattern of English

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I'm going to disagree with the other two reviewers. It did not kick-start linguistics or phonology, which had been going for decades (if not a century). But it did give phonology a needed kick in the pants, for it showed that (a) native speakers of English had indeed internalized *some* means for predicting stress, and (b) it gave a set of rules that would predict stress.

While phonologists have long since moved beyond believing that those particular rules are what native speakers have internalized--it is anything but the last word--it set a standard for what an account of phonology needed to accomplish. For it came closer than anything before (and than a lot of things after) to being observationally adequate, if not achieving descriptive adequacy. Accounting for a large set of data--a corpus--has certainly not been replaced by experimental techniques; the latter are simply another arrow in the phonologist's quiver.

As for being obsolete, I guess SPE falls into the same category as writings by Galileo or Newton or Darwin: superseded in some sense, but still worth reading.

Despite the impressive phonological apparatus Morris Halle contributed to this work, the reader needs to look closely at the derivations proposed. In almost every case, the rule applications are no more than diachronic restatements. In other words, they simply recap the historical evolution of the current forms.That is because the concept of underlying forms is the stumbling block of Chomsky's theory, and although Chomskyians and their ilk try to avoid diachronic data, they really cannot in the long run.

The Sound Pattern of English (known as "SPE") is the most complete study of the phonology of any language that has ever been undertaken. It is the last word on English stress, vowels, and consonants. It will also tell you everything you need to know about how to write phonological rules, covering complexities like parentheses, parenthesis-star, curly brackets, angled brackets, and everything else. Chomsky and Halle also tell us about their discovery of "distinctive" "features", which are the universal sound system of every language. We owe them a great debt of gratitude for this stunning achievement. "'SPE'" was Chomsky's last work on phonology, so you can see what a loss it was that he decided to switch to syntax.

Tis book kick-started the fields of phonology and linguistics, but it is long since obsolete. It's a work that is based on intuition, and the field has moved on to experimental techniques. Rather, I should say that experimental fields have grown up, like Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics, but linguists in Chomsky's tradition have largely ignored them.

It's a work that describes English, but gives the impression that it is providing deep explanations of English. For instance, it popularized the idea of a "feature" as a basic, atomic entity in linguistics. But, 50 years on, features have led to many publications but few insights that have proved themselves useful outside the tightly knit community that uses them. Speech technology, for instance, never found features to be particularly useful.

It's a Bible among a certain class of linguists, but it's not clear whether it has actually led to much.