Re: CHAT: Parallelism

Nik:  You've just summed up the traditional 20th century understanding
of phonemes; the understanding that is challenged by the few rogue
theorists who are pursuing the problem of language as gesture.

You may be right, but the possibility that there's more to
word-shapes than series of discrete, context-free units made of
(binary?) features intrigues me.

The idea that the sort of understanding you describe here is
*fundamentally* wrong, and *fundamentally* misses the point of how
language works, intrigues me even more.

But you certainly have the support of the vast majority of linguistic
work done in the 20th century behind you.

Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Tom Wier wrote:
> > I think all it shows is that the concept of a phoneme is just an
idealization,
> > but a necessary and useful one
>
> That's something like what I think.  I do believe that something like
> the phoneme is stored in the brain, and that the brain, *when producing
> speech* uses those phonemes, but, of course, in production they are
> smeared, and *when hearing speach*, the brain deduces the phonemes from
> that "smeared" sound.  I don't think that words are stored in the brain
> as "holistic" unit, but rather as a serious of phonemes.
>
> --
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> -- Benjamin Franklin
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