ABSTRACT
Long stretches of language are made up of smaller units. There is no agreed general term for these units, and we shall simply call them ‘chunks’. On a superficial inspection, the chunks of language – phrases, accent groups, syllables, phonemes – might seem to be organized into a well-defined hierarchy, with chunks on one level being made up of chunks of the level below, much as an army is divided into brigades, battalions, companies and platoons. In practice, the status of each level is ill-defined with respect to the others, and there is considerable indeterminacy.
