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The Value of Phonetic Statements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Peter Ladefoged
Peter Ladefoged*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Extract

It is odd that linguists, who pride themselves on the rigor and scientific nature of many of their concepts, should nevertheless be so tolerant of vague, unverified statements in some parts of their field. To take an example, Bloch has made many contributions to linguistic theory in a long series of excellent publications, but he does not appear to have adopted any scientific procedure to check the validity of the phonetic statements (e.g. those about tongue positions during vowel sounds) which often occur in these works. It seems as if he regards the justification of phonetic statements as outside his field as a linguist. Thus he says, ‘Qualities are identified by ear; but in linguistic works they are traditionally defined in terms of their assumed production by the vocal organs.’ This uncritical acceptance of the traditional descriptive techniques is, as we shall show, inadvisable. Disclaimers such as ‘articulatory terminology is used only because a usable auditory terminology has not yet been developed’ (loc.cit.) are not sufficient excuses for making seemingly dogmatic assertions about physiological facts.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 36 , Issue 3: July-September , September 1960 , pp. 387 - 396
Copyright
Copyright © 1960 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 See those in Readings in linguistics, ed. M. Joos (Washington, 1957).

2 Studies in Colloquial Japanese IV, Phonemics, Lg. 26.86–125 (1950).

3 Martin Joos, Acoustic Phonetics (Language Monograph 23, 1948).

4 A. M. Bell, Principles of Speech (London, 1849).

5 J. Wallis, Grammatica linguae anglicanae (London, 1653).

6 A. M. Bell, Visible speech (London, 1867).

7 D. Jones, An English pronouncing dictionary, 1st ed. (London, 1917).

8 B. Bloch and G. L. Trager, Outline of linguistic analysis (Baltimore, 1942).

9 Proceedings of the Royal Institution 22.1 (1919).

10 S. Jones, Radiography and pronunciation, British journal of radiology 2.149–50 (1929).

11 Readings in linguistics 356.

12 The classification of vowels, Lingua 5.2 (1956).

13 G. L. Trager and H. L. Smith Jr., An Outline of English structure (Norman, Okla., 1951).

14 D. Jones, An outline of English phonetics (Cambridge, 1956).

15 David Abercrombie, who has offered many helpful comments on parts of this paper.

16 Ida Ward, The phonetic and tonal structure of Efik (Cambridge, 1933).

17 K. L. Pike, Phonetics (Ann Arbor, 1943).

18 P. Ladefoged and D.E. Broadbent, Information conveyed by vowels, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 29.98–104 (1957).