Introduction

In this chapter, in § 1.2, I outline my basic assumptions about the enterprise called phonology, starting with my understanding of the scope of phonology, which I break down into three assumptions: the need for a separation of grammatical phonology and utterance phonology (which I equate with phonetic implementation), the idea that ‘phoneme’-sized segments are pivotal units in phonological representations, and the idea that there is a syllabic organisation. I then situate RcvP within the broader context of phonology as a whole. Subsequently, in § 1.3, I discuss six theses regarding phonological primes and representations. In § 1.4 I raise the question of structural analogy, that is, whether phonology is different in a fundamental way from syntax, answering this question in the negative. Finally, in § 1.5, I motivate why this book does not deal with allomorphic alternation and phonological processes, the so-called dynamic aspects of phonology.

What is phonology?

In a broad sense, phonology can be defined as the study of the perceptible form of language, granted that this perceptible form is a mind-internal representation. As such, phonology studies the observable (indeed perceived) form of languages with full consideration not only of the articulatory and psycho-acoustic properties –often referred to as ‘ phonetics’ – but also of the mind-internal representations that encode those properties of the signal that are ‘linguistically relevant’, in particular those that are contrastive, and thus ‘phonemic’. I assume here that the perceived signal and the shallowest internal representation are related by a system of phonetic implementation, which I take to be part of phonology in the broad sense.

A narrower use of the term ‘phonology’ limits this field to ‘phonemics’, although in practice this approach includes the formulation of ‘automatic’ rules that account for allophonic variation, which immediately blurs any intended distinction between phonology-as-phonemics and phonology-as-phonetics, that is, phonetic implementation. Usually allophonic rules are provided when they account for properties of the signal that could be contrastive, but are not in the language at hand, leaving ‘low-level’ properties that are claimed to never be contrastive in any language to the ‘phonetics’.