ABSTRACT
A fundamental property of spoken language is its quantal nature. Linguistic analysis shows that the sound shapes of lexical and grammatical elements are not unanalyzable wholes, but exhibit a quantized organization into combinations of a small number of discrete units such as phonemes (speech sounds, segments, or allophones) and subunits such as distinctive features. "Almost every insight gained by modern linguistics from Grimm's law to Jakobson's distinctive features depends crucially on the assumption that speech is a sequence of discrete entities" (Halle, 1964).
