11 Oct 2005

Peter Ladefoged (UCLA)

Linguistic classifications of speech sounds are apt to be biased by taxonomic traditions. such as those of the IPA, Jakobsonian distinctive features, and Chomsky and Halle phonological features. There are several reasons why none of these systems provide a principled basis for describing phonological systems.

1. Universal classificatory systems need to take into account when a sound in one language can be considered to be potentially distinct from a similar sound in another language.
2. Patterns of sounds in languages have a variety of different origins.
3. Some speech sounds do not fit into any pattern.

This paper will propose a theory of phonetics, a system for classifying the linguistic properties of speech sounds that takes these points into account - and leaves other problems for future work.

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