The Sound Pattern of English

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Summary: The first and last word on this subject
Review: 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.