ABSTRACT
The use of verbal signs and signals is a physical and physiological process as well as a psychological one. It may be compulsive or conventional, automatic or learnt. It is a social phenomenon as well as a matter of individual capacity and choice. The problems of teaching a foreign language seem to be sometimes similar, in some ways, to the problems of remedial training in the native tongue. Every language comprises certain habits or rules, not only for the formation of its distinctive sounds, but also for their combination: phonotactic rules. These rules are analagous to those operative on the phonetic level and to the syntactic ones at work on the grammatical level. Modern phonetics has gone beyond the old task of presenting mere inventories of sounds. Modern functional phonetics describes an instrument – a highly-organized signalling instrument.
