It is difficult to argue against the wisdom and insight of the comments
which have been advanced about the mismatch between traditional phonetic
categories and actual data (whether acoustic or articulatory), and in fact,
I wouldn't want to.
However, it is also clear that at some level in one language, despite the
great articulatory and acoustic variation seen within and between speakers
in articulating these sounds, they are 'the same', e.g. crop up in the same
lexical item. Naturally such a point of view is something which is
phonological rather than strictly phonetic, though of course the selection
of objects of study within linguistic phonetics is rightly guided by such
considerations. At some level - for the purposes of phonetics speech
perception and production - there is something which unites the 'trees' into
a 'wood', and it is worth bearing this in mind as the amount and the detail
of instrumental data increases. Cross-linguistically the problem is
different, although here again the less phonetically detailed view of the
IPA or a more phonological analysis can help out (though this is also not
without its problems). It seems clear, for example, that whether a language
has dark or light laterals, laterals in 'coda' or word-final position tend
to be darker than those in onset positions, and this is an interesting
observation which it would be unfortunate to miss in focusing entirely on
such specific details within one language that a comparison is not even
attempted.
I realise that these points are far from novel, and also that no-one in the
discussion has as yet suggested we should be dissuaded from attempting
cross-linguistic comparisons, but nevertheless I feel they are worth making.
Mark
Mark Jones
Department of Linguistics
University of Cambridge
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