No
rule is so general which admits not some exception.
Robert Burton.
But
that to come
Shall
all be done by the rule.
Shakespeare
Throughout
this chapter we have discussed the fact that the relationship between the
phonemic representations that are stored in one’s mental lexicon and the
phonetic representations that reflect the pronunciation of these words is
rule-governed. The phonological rule relate the minimally specified phonetic
representation of a word to the phonetic representation and are part of a
speaker’s knowledge of the language.
The
phonemic representation are minimally specified in the mental grammar because
some feature values are predictable. The underspecification reveals the
redundancy of such feature, a fact about the knowledge speakers have of the
phonology. The grammar we write aim at revealing this knowledge; if we included
these feature we would fail in our goal.
The
phonemic representation, then, should include only the non-predictable
distinctive features of the strings of phonemes that represent the words. The
phonetic representation derived by applying these rules includes all the
linguistically relevant phonetic aspects of the sounds. It does not include all
the physical properties of the sounds of an utterance, because the physical
signal may vary in many ways that have little to do with the phonological
system. The absolute pitch of the sounds, rate of speech or its loudness is not
linguistically significant. The phonetic transcription is thus also an
abstraction from the physical signal; it includes the non-variant phonetic
aspects of the utterances, those features that remain relatively the same from
speaker to speaker and from one time to another.
Although
the specific phonological rules differ from language to language, the kinds of
rules, what they do, and the natural classes they refer to are the same
cross-linguistically.
