Bridging the Phonology - Phonetics Gap - A Metatheory

The world of linguistics has seen, over the years, a substantial number of changes, all of them obeying current philosophical, psychological and engineering principles.It has been common practice to distinguish between preand post-Chomskya n linguistics, not least because of the radical philosophical and methodological changes that were brought about by the so-called Chomskyan revolution .However, it is noted that Chomsky and his followers concentrated on a purely mentalistic account of language, working essentially on guring out certain universal principles underlying language competence and usage, under the general dogma of nativism.Apart from a number of production rules permeating production and perception (in the paradigm of analysis by synthesis', see Stevens & Halle 1967), there is little, if any, mention ofspeci c analytic ways in which human beings trauslate' thoughts into acoustic signals and vice versa.It is characteristic that Chomskyan linguistics has virtually excluded phonetics from its research, presenting phonology as the output of thought encoding (Chomsky 1972).