The Ontology of Phonology (Revised)

Abstract

Abstract Though many philosophers of language have views on empirical linguistics, few, if any, have given serious attention to phonology. Recent anthologies and books on the philosophy of language either do not mention phonology at all, or at best perfunctorily restate crude and out dated notions on the subject. This is somewhat surprising, since the facts that phonology studies are critical to the individuation of expressions and to their character as objects of speech perception or outputs of speech production. But for these facts, there would be no syntax or semantics of natural languages besides sign languages (also neglected by philosophers), and philosophers deliberating about such languages would have to be silent.