2025/06/10 by John Anderson · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · doi:10.1515/flin-2025-2009
openalex publication_date 2025/06/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract Here I observe that the grammatical system that constitutes our knowledge of language and formulates how syntactic and phonological structures may be constructed on the basis of context and the categories and their colligational information stored in the lexicon of signs does not contain a phonetic level. Indeed, what phonetics describes does not contribute to this grammatical system, but belongs to an interface where it implements phonological structures as a set of articulatory movements; and, reversing the interface, the sounds they create can be scanned by our auditory apparatus for indication of those distinctions in sound and their location that can be used to differentiate signs. These articulations and the functioning of the specifically auricular apparatus are capacities that differ from the purely mental capacity that is our knowledge of grammar and its use. One indication of this is precisely the lack of any grammatical motivation for the recognition of a determinate phonetic level, something not always acknowledged by phonological theories. This situation is illustrated here with reference to so-called ‘vowel harmony’ and to the prosodic contribution to the characterization of ‘ i -umlaut’ and ‘breaking’ in the development of Old English.