ZAS Papers in Linguistics 28, 2002, 145 - 168 The Weight of Phonetic Substance in the Structure of Sound Inventories Nathalie Vallée, Louis-Jean Boë, Jean-Luc Schwartz, Pierre Badin, Christian Abry Institut de la Communication Parlée, UMR CNRS 5009, INPG – Université Stendhal BP 25 X – 38040 Grenoble Cédex 9, France Abstract In the research field initiated by Lindblom & Liljencrants in 1972, we illustrate the possibility of giving substance to phonology, predicting the structure of phonological systems with non- phonological principles, be they listener-oriented (perceptual contrast and stability) or speaker-oriented (articulatory contrast and economy). We proposed for vowel systems the Dispersion-Focalisation Theory (Schwartz et al., 1997b). With the DFT, we can predict vowel systems using two competing perceptual constraints weighted with two parameters, respectively λ and α. The first one aims at increasing auditory distances between vowel spectra (dispersion), the second one aims at increasing the perceptual salience of each spectrum through formant proximities (focalisation). We also introduced new variants based on research in physics - namely, phase space (λ,α) and polymorphism of a given phase, or superstructures in phonological organisations (Vallée et al., 1999) which allow us to generate 85.6% of 342 UPSID systems from 3- to 7-vowel qualities. No similar theory for consonants seems to exist yet. Therefore we present in detail a typology of consonants, and then suggest ways to explain plosive vs. fricative and voiceless vs. voiced consonants predominances by i) comparing them with language acquisition data at the babbling stage and looking at the capacity to acquire relatively different linguistic systems in relation with the main degrees of freedom of the articulators; ii) showing that the places “preferred” for each manner are at least partly conditioned by the morphological constraints that facilitate or complicate, make possible or impossible the needed articulatory gestures, e.g. the complexity of the articulatory control for voicing and the aerodynamics of fricatives. A rather strict coordination between the glottis and the oral constriction is needed to produce acceptable voiced fricatives (Mawass et al., 2000). We determine that the region where the combinations of Ag (glottal area) and Ac (constriction area) values results in a balance between the voice and noise components is indeed very narrow. We thus demonstrate that some of the main tendencies in the phonological vowel and consonant structures of the world’s languages can be explained partly by sensorimotor constraints, and argue that actually phonology can take part in a theory of Perception-for-Action-Control. 1 Phonology in a substance-based linguistics Speech communication operates on two highly-structured levels, the system itself and its physical realisation. This is probably the reason why speech communication is so efficient compared to other communication means used by man or animal. The terms language and speech refer to these two levels, separated by Saussurean structural linguistics in form and substance, and reconsidered by generative grammar under the terms competence and performance. Throughout the 20th century, several axioms of the core of structuralist, and subsequently generativist, approaches have conditioned relationship between phonetics and linguistics: • the language/speech dichotomy; • the independence of these two concepts; • the primacy of language over speech.