These are the slides for my GLOWing lecture on Dec 15, 2023. The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVpwRvNjloQ
I present conventional wisdom on some points of phonology and
offer an outlandish and idiosyncratic alternative. For example, I argue that minimal pairs and contrast play no rule in phonological grammars (although these notions are in the phonologist's toolkit for *discovering* phonological grammars); I argue that assimilation should not be accorded any special role in phonology; and I claim that constraint satisfaction approaches are only relevant for modeling artifacts like circuit design and sudoku, but not to scientific enterprises like understanding natural objects like language.