ABSTRACT
LOOKING AHEAD Speaking to other people and understanding what they say is much more than producing and hearing speech sounds. Section 3.1 discusses the organization of language and the ways that meanings are communicated. People who can communicate in a language must have certain shared knowledge and we need to specify just what this common knowledge is. (See Section 3.2.)
In speaking our language we produce a multitude of different speech sounds-phones-far more than we are aware of until we begin to study phonetics. These phones are organized into a much smaller number of phonemes, the units in the sound system of the language. We are well aware of phonemes in our language because they make possible differences of meaning. Section 3.3 deals at some length with the difference between phones and phonemes, between phonetics and phonology.
