Standard manuals of Spanish pronunciation recognize that both [+continuant] and [-continuant] surface variants occur for the voiced obstruents/bdg/. Within generative phonology, it has been assumed that the systematic phonemic representation for these voiced obstruents should be [-continuant] /bdg/, with a rule of spirantization converting these…

A variety of types of evidence are examined to help determine the true nature of "deep structure" and what, if any, implications this has for linguistic theory as well as culture theory generally. The evidence accumulated over the past century on the nature of phonetic and phonemic systems is briefly discussed, and the following areas of…