DISTINCTIVE FEATURES AND LARYNGEAL CONTROL

Physiological, acoustic, and perceptual data indicate that the timing of events at the glottis relative to articulation differentiates homorganic stops in many languages. Such categories are variously described in terms of voicing, aspiration, and force of articulation. Chomsky & Halle 1968 have proposed a universal set of phonetic features, four of which-voice, tensity, glottal constriction, and heightened subglottal pressure-allegedly operate to control the onset timing of laryngeal pulsing. But the observational basis for their analysis is flimsy, and Chomsky & Halle have no substantive argument for rejecting the possibility of temporal control of laryngeal function. Until fairly recently the non-historical study of language was, at least in the United States, pretty much the province of two groups of people: the grammarians and the phoneticians. Each group paid little if any serious attention to the problems and findings of the other, even in the area of phonology, where their interests would seem to converge. In the case of the phoneticians, their ignorance of linguistics was not normally elevated to a matter of principle. Some grammarians, however, refused to consider phonetic research an integral part of linguistics. Such work was consigned to physiology and physics at the very time that the primacy of the spoken over the written forms of language was being asserted most emphatically. ' The dichotomy drawn between langue and parole may have served as an excuse for minimizing the attention given to language in its most directly observable manifestation. Moreover, from the principle that only message-differentiating phonetic features are relevant to language description, linguists proceeded to the practice of knowing only as much about the processes of speech production and perception as sufficed to provide a set of labels by which to spell different messages distinctively.2 In the linguist's concern with the components of sentences and their arrangements, his primary interest may not be in 1 This point has been discussed at length, with reference to various linguists, by Haugne 1951. 2 Phoneticians, often enough scolded for doing research not immediately relatable to the linguist's own interests, have generally tried to remedy this situation; but sometimes this seems to take the form of renouncing research in any area not directly relevant to linguistics as most narrowly defined. Thus a phonetician with some training in linguistics can write, in connection with a study of mechanical pressures developed in the articulation of certain consonants, that 'the nasals are still another matter, as they do not enter into the lenis/fortis opposition, and calculating percentages of overlapping of their values with those of the stops would be meaningless' (Mal6cot 1966a:176). Phoneticians have failed to exploit research possibilities that closer attention to linguists' discussions would have made them aware of; but this does not imply that areas of phonetic research with which linguists have not concerned themselves are without relevance to linguistics. Recent discussion by Mattingly & Liberman 1969 suggests that linguists have been sometimes too ready to deny linguistic relevance to language and speech studies which threatened to yield findings not readily expressible in the current mode of linguistic description.