Chapter 4.
DESCRIPTION
REFLECTIONS ON EACH TOPIC
This chapter is an area where you can learn the phonology of English,
In the preceding chapter, we investigated the physical production of
speech sounds in terms of the articulator mechanisms of the human
vocal tract. That investigation was possible because of some rather
amazing facts about the nature of language. When we considered the
and has been very influential in both the field of phonology and in the
analysis of the English language. linguistic subsystem, separate from
other components of the grammar, that transforms an
human vocal tract, we didn’t have to specify whether we were talking
about a fairly large person, over six feet tall, weighing over 200 pounds,
or about a rather small person, about five feet tall, weighing less than
100 pounds. Yet those two physically different individuals would
inevitably have physically different vocal tracts.
underlying phonemic sequence according to rules and produces as its
output the phonetic form that is uttered by a speaker.