The Importance of Phonology for Phonetics

The need for phonetics to take into account phonological analysis is stressed, arguing that phonetics & phonology can benefit each other in explaining language- or speaker-specific results within a theoretical framework that considers speech production & reception to be, on all levels, a social activity. It is shown how W. U. Dressler's (1996) natural phonology satisfactorily accounts for the organization of social life, which is one of the main functions of language. The notions of phoneme, target, & undershoot are examined, with special reference to their definition & treatment in B. Lindblom, 1963. Standard Austrian German & Russian data are compared in critiquing & proposing language-specific definition of the concept of coarticulatory resistance. It is argued that neither speech production nor acoustic output are the outcome of articulatory failure or products of residual arbitrariness. Their systematic nature is captured in natural phonology, where phonological processes are phonetically motivated & follow universal preferences. Although the phonetic motivation of processes makes them appear to be universally applicable, it is the phonology of a language that decides whether a phonological process is applied, to what extent it is applied, or whether it is suppressed. Figures, References. Z. Dubiel