Harry van der Hulst seemed afraid that his
talk (mp3;
handout) at the
CUNY Phonology Forum on Precedence would spoil the party: the other kids wanted to play with this new toy they had just discovered, the arrow (of time), and he wanted to throw it out of the window.
In any case, this is a very clear presentation of his idea why we should get rid of the arrow: because it is superfluous if we posit enough structure; for some reason he includes also subsegmental structure in this, but it is not completely clear to me why, since this hardly seems temporally ordered. This is a valid point, although it raises many issues, e,g, with respect to autosegmental structure, constraints on adjacent coda-onset combinations (sonority sequencing) etc.
It would also be interesting to compare Van der Hulst's Radical CV approach to Lowenstam and Scheer's CVCV theory, which, especially in Scheer's version seems to have come to quite the opposite conclusion: given the redundancy of tree structures and linear ordering, CVCV tries to do away with the former. On which criteria could we decide which of those two is the right move?