John Goldsmith

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John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology in 1976.

The main gist of autosegmental theory is that phonology no longer regards the phenomena it studies as a linear sequence of phonemes and a collection of processes which describe the changes which occur in this sequence. Goldsmith proposes to represent phonological phenomena as a collection of parallel tiers with individual segments which represent certain features of speech. Various feature systems have been proposed. Depending on the nature of the study already a few can explain phenomena which are difficult to explain otherwise. An example would be one tier representing the conventional segments (in the sense of phonemes) and an additional tier representing tone. (see tone language)

Goldsmith currently serves as the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago with appointments in both the Linguistics and Computer Science departments. Some of his recent research falls under Computational Linguistics, particularly exemplified by his "Linguistica" project, a body of software which attempts to automatically analyze the morphology of a language.