ABSTRACT
What John Lyons is arguing is that the language-faculty should not be tied in an absolute manner to a realization in the spoken medium - a position that I would fully endorse. After all, the expressive power of the sign languages of the deaf is in no way inferior to spoken languages and there is no doubt, in my mind, that as human beings we come into the world with an ability to produce and understand signs which is not restricted to a particular medium. It may still be true, however, that in human beings not suffering from a speech/hearing impairment the predisposition to vocalize is severely constrained by species-specific mechanisms. Still, we have to accept that it is logically and empirically possible that the association between language and speech is a contingent one. If this is so we should not be surprised if phonology were to obey quite different principles from morphology, syntax or semantics.
