Osservazioni sulla sostanza dei primitivi nella Teoria degli Elementi e il rapporto fra fonologia e fonetica

Abstract

The paper concerns the nature of segmental primes and the relationship between phonological categories and phonetic surface. The view of classic Element Theory and Government Phonology, that elements correspond to acoustic signatures in the speech signal, is here applied to phenomena of phonetics-phonology mismatch, maintaining that the ambiguity that may occasionally arise in phonetic forms needs not to be attributed to an allegedly arbitrary transduction from phonology to phonetics.  A non-phonemic conception of segments is adopted, whereby the elemental content of segments, which is lexically established, may undergo changes determined by prosodic and segmental licensing.