Who practiced morphophonemics?

Question

In the modern textbooks you can easily find such claims as the following from Hayes 2009:

In the 1940s and 1950s, many phonologists worked with a theory in which (roughly) all neutralizing rules were assumed to apply before all allophonic rules. This in effect divided the phonology into two components: a neutralizing component, whose units were called “morphophonemes,” and a non-neutralizing component, which dealt with phonemes and allophones.

This clearly goes back to the famous claim by M. Halle in his Sound Pattern of Russian (p. 23), where he speaks about some "traditional linguistic descriptions" that postulate "morphophonemic representations". However, he does not specify whom exactly he had in mind.

I feel stupid, but I don't understand either what linguist he could have in mind. So, my question is: could anyone name a phonologist who used to represent utterance in three levels of representation, morphophonemic, phonemic and phonetic.

Answer 1

This is a characteristic of so-called American Structuralism. An example (I was just in this book yesterday) is M.A.R. Barker in Klamath grammar (1964) – it is especially characteristic of the Berkeley school of linguistic analysis (many of those dissertations were published in the University of California publications in linguistics series). I especially recommend those works because they tended to notationally distinguish the three levels, writing [pʰ], /p/ and |P| for phones, phonemes and morphophonemes. The ideas were accepted in many works outside of Berkeley, as one will see in numerous grammar books such as Poppe Tatar manual, where (unfortunately) // is used for both phonemic and morophophonemic representations – still, that grammar has a section on morphophonemic alternations, which follows the section on allophonics. The best source of information on the topic is grammars written in the US after WWII, up to the introduction of generative grammar. You even find this approach adopted in Chomsky's MA thesis Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew. The volume Readings in linguisics I edited by Joos is also a good collection of works in American Structuralism (though that volume includes works such as Sapir Sound pattern in language which predates the three level + strict separation doctrine).