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Title: Long since obsolete
Review: 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.
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