Two important consequences follow from this. First, that phonology is logically (and causally) prior to phonetics as here defined. Second, phonology is also epistemologically prior to phonetics. Judgments about phonetic events are invariably made in terms of perceptual phonology. (Hammarberg 1976:356)
In this post I’d like to briefly review a view of the relationship between phonetics and phonology as related by Hammarberg (1976) and Appelbaum (1996), the former being primarily concerned with production and the latter with perception.
Phonetics, being concerned with the material and physical, has tended to align itself with the physical sciences (and physics in particular), and with the empiricist tradition in science.1,2 In contrast, much of what has been called the cognitive revolution in the cognitive sciences, and in linguistics in particular, is explicitly anti-empiricist. As Hammarberg and Appelbaum argue, the empiricist biases of phonetics make it ill-suited to explain fundamental facts about speech.
It is generally understood that spoken language is not produced as a discrete sequence but rather a series of overlapping gestures and acoustic signatures. Anyone who has looked closely at the acoustics of speech will already recognize that it is impossible to say exactly where, in a word like cat, the [æ]-ness ends and the [t]-ness begins. In a worrd like soon, the fricative portion shows signs of rounding not found in words like scene. From an acoustic record alone, one cannot determine empirically how many segments are present. And, one cannot produce natural-sounding synthesized speech via simple concatenation of segments. It is not just that the [æ, t, s] and other segments are coarticulated with nearby segments, however: it is also the case that there are simply no invariant acoustic-phonetic properties that uniquely characterize [t]. A [t] spoken by a child, by a man with a mouth full of chili, by a woman missing her front teeth, and so on may have radically different acoustic properties, yet we as scientists understand them to be in some sense identical phenomena.
This is a basic principle of scientific discovery: one must assume that “the vast multitude of phenomena he encounters may be accounted for in terms of the interactions of a fairly small number of basic entities, standard elementary individuals. His task thus becomes one of identifying the basic entities and describing the interactions in virtue of which the encountered phenomena are generated. From this emerge our…notions of the identity and nonidentity of phenomena.” (Hammarberg, p. 354) The linguistic notion of segment is perhaps the most important of these basic entities. It is an entity recognized both by those early lay-linguists, the Iron Age scribes who gave us the alphabet, as well as one of the most venerable notions in the history of modern linguistics. Yet, segments do not have a physical reality of their own; they do not exist in the physical world, but only in the human mind. They are “internally generated, the creature of some kind of perceptual-cognitive process.”
It is generally uncontroversial to speak of the output of the phonological component as the input to the phonetic component. From this it follows that phonology is cognitively and epistemically prior to phonetics. Coarticulation, for instance, results because of the process which maps segments—which, remember, exist only in the mind of speakers—onto articulatory and acoustic events. But one cannot talk about coarticulation without segments, since it is the spreading of articulatory-acoustic properties between segments that defines coarticulation. One must know that /s/ exists, and has an inherent properties not normally associated with—or compatible with—lip rounding to even observe the anticipatory lip rounding in words like soon.
The existence of coarticulation is often understood teleologically, in the sense that is taken to be in part mechanical, automatic, inertial. This too is a mistake, according to Hammarberg: apparent teleological explanations of human behavior should be recast, as is the tradition in Western philosophy, as the result of intentional, causal behavior. The existence of anticipatory articulation shows us that the influence of the /u/ in soon has on the realization of the preceding /s/ occurred some time before instructions to the articulators were generated, and the level at which this influence occurs should therefore be identified with the mental rather than the physiological. Hammarberg continues to argue that coarticulatory processes are akin to ordinary allophony and should reside in the scope of phonological theory. This argument is strengthened insofar as coarticulation has a language-specific character, as is sometimes claimed.
Appelbaum, while not citing Hammarberg’s original paper, extends this critique to the theory of speech perception. It is an assumption of the so-called motor theory that there are invariant properties which identify “phonetic gestures”. Since the motor theorists do not present any evidence that such invariants soc much as exist, we instead must be abstract out into mental entities which have all the properties of—and which Appelbaum identifies with—what we are calling segments, or perhaps lower-level entities like phonological features. Under this approach, then, there is no content to the motor theory of speech perception beyond the obvious point that phonetic experience, somehow, turns into purely mental representations. Again, the empiricist biases of phonetics have lead us astray.
The above discussion may influence the way we think about the role of phonetics in linguistics education. Phonetics is generally viewed as its own autonomous subdiscipline, and modern acoustic and articulatory analysis is certainly complex enough to justify serious graduate instruction, but it would seem to suggest that phonetic tools exist primarily as a way of gathering phonological information rather than as an autonomous discipline. I am not sure I am ready to conclude that, but it certainly is provocative!
Endnotes
- Empiricism refers to a theory of epistemology and should not be confused with the empirical method in science (the use of sense-based observation). Many prominent thinkers reject empiricism in favor of rationalism, but support the use of empirical methods. No one is seriously arguing against the use of the senses.
- This will be shown to be yet another example of physics envy as the source of sloppy thinking in linguistics.
References
Appelbaum, I. 1996. The lack of invariance problem and the goal of speech perception. In Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 1541-1544.
Hammarberg, R. 1976. The metaphysics of coarticulation. Journal of Phonetics 4: 353-363.