New Views on Language and Phonetic Variation

The Gussenhoven article introduced me to an area of linguistics I previously knew nothing about.  In the past, my study of language boiled down to tokens and written language that could be analyzed through computational linguistic methods.  In "The production of speech", Gusssenhoven gives a comprehensive survey of how humans make speech sounds.  He gives a brief explanation of everything related to speech production from the vocal anatomy (larynx, glottis, phanryx, tongue, mouth, etc) to how these parts interact to produce certain sounds.  It was really fascinating to learn about the complexity of spoken language.

The more technical paper by Kenstowicz puts forth an argument that linguists cannot represent the rules of English phonology as a set of surface-level phonetic rules that explain the variation we hear in language.  It begins with an introduction to phonemes using the English letter t, a topic that we covered last Thursday in lecture.  Then it launches into its argument for a lower level of representation that includes more than just pure phonetic transcription.  To support this idea, it cites the English example of "writer" versus "rider", which native English speakers identify based on the length of the vowel sound; he also rebuts a few arguments that claim that taking into account morphological differences in words can solve the problems he discusses.

However, what I found most interesting was the idea that language is something we can understand without understanding its rules.  When we speak our native language, we have an intuition on what sounds right and what sounds wrong, and we can identify when someone is not a native speaker.  As Kenstowicz says, "If we come into contact with a speaker who fails to follow them, we may feel that he or she is not 'one of us'."  I really felt this when I was trying to learn German in Germany.  I heard no discernible difference between my words and the way my native speaker friends spoke, but they could hear something wrong in my pronunciation. Now that I know about phonemes, I think I understand how they could hear my improperly spoken German when I absolutely could not.