Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 210

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correlates vary with context (cf., for instance, coarticulation
effects). Features of place and manner of production also
differ phonetically, as was pointed out by Professor Fischer-
Jorgensen. Thus, phonetic features are quantitative.
Needless to say, speech is phonetically something other than
a mere sequence of discrete units (a chain of phonemes).
Commutation tests or distributional analyses hardly inform
us which units we produce as speakers and perceive as listeners.
Here an integrated feature analysis working on the articul-
atory, acoustic, and perceptive level on the one hand, and on
the syntactic and the phonological levels (with ‘linguistic
units’) on the other hand, is required for formal and real
reasons.
To formulate general phonetic and phonological rules we
need much more information about the hierarchy between
phonetic feature levels, their time-varying patterns, and their
linguistic functions.
Per Linell: Some of the reports presented here, particularly
those of Professor Moulton and Professor Benediktsson, actual-
ized several of Martinet’s well-known concepts of structural
phonology, and this led to discussion on the status of the
‘taxonomic’ phoneme. As we all know, some doubts about it
have been raised by prominent generativists, in particular
Chomsky and Halle, who have shown, convincingly I think,
that the taxonomic phoneme has no place in a total description
of language, i. e., in an explanatory description of the whole
function of language as a system of relating meaning to sound
(or, in other words, in an explanation of the speaker-hearer’s
linguistic competence). Certainly we cannot find any satis-
factory explanations of the structures and possibilities ofchange
of phonological systems if we look at these in isolation from
syntactic, morphological, and semantic phenomena. Yet it is
reasonable to ask if fairly superficial phonetic phenomena do
not play any role in establishing symmetry (stabilization)
of sound systems. It seems plausible that concepts like fields
of dispersion (of taxonomic phonemes), holes in the pat-