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Phonetic Segments and the Organization of Speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Luca Gasparri
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Abstract

According to mainstream linguistic phonetics, speech can be modeled as a string of discrete sound segments or “phones” drawn from a universal phonetic inventory. Recent work has argued that a mature phonetics should refrain from theorizing about speech and speech processing using sound segments and that the phone concept should be eliminated from linguistic theory. The article lays out the tenets of the phone methodology and evaluates its prospects in light of the eliminativist arguments. I claim that the eliminativist arguments fail to show that the phone concept should be eliminated from linguistic theory.

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Articles
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 86 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 304 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am indebted to Claire Beyssade, Paul Egré, Mikhail Kissine, Salvador Mascarenhas, and François Recanati for discussion and comments on ancestors of this article and to two anonymous reviewers for detailed and very helpful feedback on the submitted manuscript. All errors and misunderstandings are my own. The research that led to this article was supported by an individual fellowship from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and by grants ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL*.

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