ABSTRACT
Phonology is concerned with the physical actualization of sentences, with the sounds of language and with the way these are produced. From a purely physical point of view, the utterances that we produce and perceive are quasi-continuous signals; yet to normal speakers, utterances appear as sequences of words that in turn are sequences of sounds. A basic task of phonology is to provide a proper account for this perceptual "illusion." That it is appropriate to regard it as an illusion, i.e., as something in the speaker's and hearer's mind rather than as something directly present in the signal, becomes clearer when one considers the fact that our ability to recognize words and sounds in utterances is drastically impaired when instead of utterances in a language we know, we are presented with utterances in languages we do not know. Since the fidelity of the signal is not impaired, the drop in our ability to recognize words and sounds must be attributed to our lack of knowledge of the language in which the utterance is produced; i.e., to something within us rather than to a property of the signal. This "something within us" is the proper subject matter of phonology, just as it is the proper subject matter of syntax, semantics, and all the other subdisciplines concerned with the nature of language.
