Chapter outline

The chapter presents crosslinguistic generalizations about the sounds that languages use, how the sounds take on variant forms depending on the phonological context, how they are ordered relative to each other, and what the basic phonological terms are that crosslinguistic generalizations are couched in. Recurrent properties of visual forms of language – writing systems and sign languages – are also discussed.

Introduction

As we saw in the preceding syntax and morphology chapters, the well-formedness of a linguistic object depends on the choice and arrangement of its parts. In syntax, it is the proper choice of words and word forms and their ordering that make up well-formed sentences. In morphology in turn, words are the wholes and morphemes are the parts: words are well-formed if the morphemes, their forms, and their sequences are the way grammatical conventions require them to be.

However, syntactic and morphological well-formedness doesn’t guarantee that a linguistic utterance is fully grammatical. In addition to words and morphemes, there is a third type of element whose choice and arrangement are crucial for grammaticality. For an illustration, consider three alternative pronunciations of the sentence Spring is here. In (1c), /y/ is a high front rounded vowel.