ABSTRACT
Speech articulations are complex things, even when conceptualised as ‘postures’: and articulatory chains or ‘gestures’ are more complex still. Descriptive orders in phonetics such as that presented by Pike (1943) are attempts to deal systematically with some of this phonetic complexity; but when operating as phonologists phoneticians have tended on the whole to ignore a large part of it in the attempt to produce phonologies that are word-based, segmental and, given these two, economical. Statements referring subsequently to phonetic properties refer to such properties as have been previously selected as phonologically relevant to segments – and what has been ignored is gone for ever. I want here to discuss the workings of some properties of English utterances which, if heeded at all, are deemed to be of little importance – at least in the great majority of approaches to English phonology. I shall suggest that, for all that, there are reasons for their being regarded as of interest from the phonological – and not just the phonetic – point of view. I use the term ‘sound-complex’ in this paper in place of the more usual ‘sound’ or ‘speech-sound’ for reasons that will, I hope, become self-evident.
