Submitted by grzegorz on 15 July, 2020 - 08:18.
It is with great sadness that we received the news that Professor David Stampe (Linguistics Department, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa) passed away on 24th of June.
Although his interests included computational linguistics, prosody, verse and music, lexicography, holistic typology and drift, Austroasiatic and Indo-European languages, he is most widely recognized as the founder of the theory of Natural Phonology, subsequently developed with Patricia Donegan. Natural Phonology was proposed as an alternative to both structural and generative approaches to phonology current at the time. Its basic thesis is that phonological systems are phonetically motivated. The theory operates with phonological processes, which constitute natural responses of the human vocal and perceptual systems to the difficulties encountered in the production and perception of speech. Phonological representations are established in terms of the phonetically motivated processes according to the principle of naturalness. David Stampe first presented his theory in 1969 in the famous paper on “The acquisition of phonetic representation” (CLS 5) and elaborated it in his 1979 Dissertation on Natural Phonology (Bloomington: IULC) which originally appeared in 1973 under the title How I spent my summer vacation.
Natural Phonology later expanded to other areas of language giving rise to Natural Linguistics (cf. the works of Wolfgang U. Dressler). Further developments of Natural Phonology include the research conducted here in Poznań at the Faculty of English (former School of English) of Adam Mickiewicz University by myself and my numerous students and colleagues in the Department of Contemporary English Language. We have been inspired in our work by David Stampe. His scholarly legacy, owing to its visionary nature, will remain with us forever.
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk and colleagues
