A Kinesthetic Approach To Phonology

The mainstream approach to Chinese phonology starts with two abstract units—the phoneme and the underlying tone,and ends with rules that help these two units to generate their different variants.This paradigm of research was controversial at its very beginning,and has come to a standstill recently.Among the many reasons for this,the most fatal one is its circularity in argument—it describes the description itself,which is a corollary of its inability to recognize the actual units of linguistic operation.This thesis argues that the ontology of language lies in human movements,which specify worldly entities and relations.The kinesthesis from the respiratory system,viz.its muscle sense,keeps track of its own movement and that of another bodily system through coordination.Because a human interaction with an entity necessarily reflects the properties of the entity in question,the movement,or action(relation)will take on properties that are different from those of other movements.The different entities specified by the movements of different sensory organs and the relations(both temporal and atemporal)specified by interactive behaviors are then distinct.Their kinesthetic memories subsequently become both latencies and constraints for linguistic expressions.These latencies consist of two levels of in-formation: one is the first-order,qualitative,procedural representations that describe the properties of entities or relations,which function as the invariants for them;the other are the second-order,analytic,procedural representations that describe the spatiotemporal statuses of entities or relations,which function as context-sensitive orienting actions(OA).An intention to communicate about an entity or relation drives the integration of these two factors to form a prosodic word.Because the latter is always a function of the whereabouts of an entity,a relation or an event in relation to the current communicative context,the former,which determines the organization of a prosodic word,is more often than not twisted by the latter and has different structural realizations.Behind the written form of a word are,therefore,a group of prosodic words that have the same organization—the components of the invariant remain the same,but different structures—the structural relations among the components of the invariant undergo plastic changes due to the perturbations of the OAs.In this perspective,phonological knowledge is not an inventory of linguistic primitives and a set of rules guiding their metamorphoses,but the capacity to replicate the invariants in ways that are suited to the effective communication about the entities,relations or events that are specified by the invariants.Evidence for this view comes from the lexis of the Ganyu dialect,which show that the invariant for an entity or a relation is an executable,dynamic vocal configuration that has its own spatial,temporal and tensional properties.The movements of the active articulator(s)involved in it,the lips,the tongue tip,etc.or some of them in combination,can be considered to be biphasic oscillatory circuits.An OA can be prospective(OAp),retrospective(OAr)or neutral(OAn),the first two of which are unidirectional vectors while the third is a zero one,and can be used for the expressions of space and time in terms of the human demarcations of them,forming a set.When an invariant and an OA are integrated for communication,the OAp or the OAr,being unidirectional,would lend prominence to the sympathetic phase in an invariant and downplay the antisympathetic one;while in the third case the two phases of an invariant are left unscathed.The invariant is thus rendered to be inflectionally indicative of a referent that is spatially in the front,middle or the past or temporally in the past,present or future.The observations(introspections)and experiments(Praat spectrums)on the data from the Ganyu dialect and Putonghua have a number of consequences.For instance,they show that a character or a character set is in fact a label,or an organizer,for a cluster of prosodic words that are different in their grammatical or pragmatic meanings.Lexical alternants(phonemic and tone variants),rhythmic patterns,intonation,etc.are holistically determined by the integration of invariants with the OAs.Language,by extrapolation,is essentially a set of invariant-OA pairings.Since any invariant is a conditional reflex that is inherently spatial-temporal-tensional and an OA is no less so,a prosodic word is necessarily also spatial-temporal-tensional.The places and manners of articulation and the tones(pitches)for the group of prosodic words labeled with the same character then vary from one another.The principle of double articulation and discreteness as regards the makeup of a word,widely accepted in the field of linguistics,has entirely overlooked this dynamic side of a character.It is,therefore,necessary that diachronic studies like etymology,historical phonology,philology,etc.and synchronic ones like phonetics,phonology,phonetic changes,etc.should shift their focus on static descriptions to this kind of dynamicity.The tentative conclusion of this thesis is that a kinesthetic approach should be a welcome alternative or complement to mainstream approaches,in that it tries to avoid circularity and looks for deeper explanations of linguistic facts.