Fonetica e fonologia. Mente, linguaggio, suoni

The study of phonological phenomena plays a central role in the history of linguistic thought. It is no coincidence that the conceptualization of Saussure's Cours and European structuralism, and the principles of American phonematics are based on the relationship between sounds and meanings. In these approaches, phonological analysis elaborates some abstract notions, such as distinctive property, phoneme and arbitrariness. With the 1968 book by Chomsky and Halle, the various levels of analysis are integrated into a unitary theoretical and conceptual framework in which the different components of a language are treated as the expression of a specialized cognitive faculty. Phonological properties are, therefore, part of the speaker's linguistic knowledge on a par with other structural categories, such as the combination of words in the sentence and its syntactic organization. As we see in the text, the models of phonological analysis resulting from Chomsky and Halle's proposals develop a detailed design of phonetic mechanisms. What emerges is an unexpected and varied horizon of phenomena, a development of complex systems and processes, which are the basis of the speaker's sophisticated cognitive abilities.