Music and the phonological principle: Remarks from the phoneticians’s bench

Abstract

Language does not use an arbitrary collection of noises to convey different meanings. Instead, a small number of sound elements, which are themselves meaningless, are put together in various combinations to make words. In classical structuralist linguistics, this characteristic of language is referred to as ``the phonemic principle''. In subsequent work, the phoneme has given way to distinctive features and autosegmental tiers, but the idea is preserved that meaningful forms are built up by regularly combining a small number of meaningless sound elements. Let us therefore speak of ``the phonological principle.'' Because of this fact about language, it is reasonable to develop a theory of phonology as such.