Can we objectively
assign an importance to a syllable?
How simple might
English intonational phonology be?
Language has
many interesting, apparently complicated effects.Linguists typically explain these by discrete rules on
discrete objects, such as a /stop t/ should be transformed to a /flap t/
when in the middle of an unstressed syllable.This is phonetics operations on discrete entities.Phonology is the physical implementation
of these discrete entities, and is often considered relatively
unimportant.Ill show in this talk
that with a physically reasonable model, the phonetics (I.e. the strategy
that the brain uses to control the articulators) can explain much that is
normally considered to be phonology.