This book is an attempt to bring together various strands of my work from over the past forty years, both as a researcher and as a teacher. The themes that I have chosen to discuss in some detail here can all be seen as problematical, even though typically they are taken for granted. My experience as a student, and then later as a researcher, taught me to question most things that were presented to me as accepted (and acceptable) dogma. This was the case despite being trained in an essentially structuralist tradition, before the appearance of The sound pattern of English, but I was also lucky enough to be introduced to the Firthian tradition of linguistics as an alternative viewpoint. The Chomskyan revolution, so-called, clearly was just that in the way language was approached as an object of academic investigation, but nevertheless it continued with many of the features of its predecessor, structuralism, especially in the area of phonology.

This book has thus grown out of a long dissatisfaction with the way in which many exponents of phonological theory do not approach their analyses in a consistent and principled way, often at a very basic level. It was quite striking that Goldsmith (1995a) (reviewed in Lodge, 1997) contained many such papers; these papers were claimed to be a selection of mainstream views on the structure of human phonologies. Lodge (1997) looks at a number of key issues which are fundamental to phonological theorizing, but which are treated as though they need not be revisited, despite several calls to that effect over the years.