A phonetological system is comprised of a set of phonetological units and their relationships. Alas, I could not come up yet with a proper definition of “phonetological unit” that would subsume units of both visual and sound systems. Thoughts on this are much appreciated.In my view of phonetology, a phonetological system has the following properties:<ul><li>It is a dynamic system (Thelen &amp; Smith 2006; Vihman 2014, Capra &amp; Luisi 2018).</li><li>It is a physio-neuro-cognitive system. It has:<ul><li>A physical component (Ohala 1990; Ohala 2005).</li><li>A neuro-cognitive component.<ul><li>It is rich in details (Johnson 1997; Pierrehumbert 2001; Bybee 2002).</li><li>It is self-organising and emergent (Wedel 2007; Wedel 2011).</li><li>It uses both stored exemplars and stored abstractions at multiple levels (Ambridge 2020).</li></ul></li></ul></li><li>It is part of a complex socio-cultural system (Boer 2015; Foulkes &amp; Docherty 2006; Thompson, Kirby &amp; Smith 2016).</li></ul>I also consider these statements to be extendible more generally to linguisticality (Haspelmath 2020) as a holistic system.

A phonetological system is comprised of a set of phonetological units and their relationships.

Phonetological systems

In light of the ideas proposed in Cysouw &amp; Good (<a href="https://stefanocoretta.github.io/meta.html#ref-cysouw2013" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">2013</a>) and van Rooy (<a href="https://stefanocoretta.github.io/meta.html#ref-rooy2021" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">2021</a>), we believe linguistics would benefit from a formalised notion of linguistic system that encompasses any kind of system, from linguistic families down to idiolects, and any type of variation.Cysouw &amp; Good (<a href="https://stefanocoretta.github.io/meta.html#ref-cysouw2013" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">2013</a>) propose a meta-model based on linguistic documentation and description. From this model, we borrow two concepts:&nbsp;<ul><li>Glossonym (p. 339) A glossonym is a name (noun) used to refer to a linguistic system, whether a language, a lect, or a genealogically or areally related group of languages. A glossonym does not have a referent nor a significant, but rather it is just a signifier. For example, the glossonym Altaic, no actual reference is made to any linguistic entity, but only to the fact that this word has been used to refer to linguistic systems.</li><li>Doculect (p 342) A doculect (i.e. documented lect) is a linguistic entity as it is documented/described in a specific resource (book, paper, booklet, website, etc.). This term is agnostic as to the type of linguistic entity (family, language, variety, etc.). A doculect is the pairing of a glossonym and a resource. An example: [Howard (<a href="https://stefanocoretta.github.io/meta.html#ref-howard1986" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">1986</a>); mawayana].</li></ul>Cysouw &amp; Good (<a href="https://stefanocoretta.github.io/meta.html#ref-cysouw2013" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">2013: 347</a>) also introduce the concept of “languoid” which refers to “any (possibly hierarchical) grouping of doculects, in principle ranging from a set of idiolects to a high-level language family”.We propose instead the term glossolect, which—unlike languoid—does not necessarily entail a strictly-nested hierarchical structure. This difference accommodates those cases where linguistic grouping is not based on clear-cut splits, but rather based on a network of shared features (Kalyan 2018), in which a doculect can in fact belong to different intersecting glossolects.A glossolect is thus a set of doculects and can refer to any of a macro-family, a family, a dialect continuum, a linkage, a language, a variety, an idiolect, etc.In terms of types of linguistic variation, we borrow from classical sociolinguistics (Coșeriu 1973, 2000; Mioni 1983):<ul><li>Diachronic: variation in time.</li><li>Diatopic: variation in geographical space (less frequently used is diachoric for more restricted spatial variation).</li><li>Diastratic: variation based on social class and groups.</li><li>Diaphasic: variation based on linguistic and social context (includes registers and slangs).</li><li>Diamesic: variation based on the means of communication (e.g., visual/oral vs written, web vs print, etc.).</li></ul>In sum:<ul><li>A glossolect is a set of doculects.</li><li>A doculect is a pairing of a glossonym and a resource.</li><li>A glossonym is a name used to refer to a linguistic entity.</li><li>A resource is any object (publication, media, etc.) containing linguistic materials.</li><li>Glossolects can be situated within a specific diachronic, diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic, diamesic context.</li></ul>

A glossolect is a set of doculects which are pairings of a glossonym and a resource. Glossolects can refer to any type of linguistic system.

Glossolects

A fundamental aspect of the concepts of "language", "family", "branch", "dialect", "variety" and so on is that they are not formally defined in their general usage within the field of linguistics.It is thus important to develop an epistemological and possibly ontological definition of these concepts.

Formalising the concept of "language" and related concepts, like "dialect" and "language family".

Formalising the concept of "language"

A well-known property of vowel duration is that it tends to be modulated by vowel height: higher vowels are usually shorter than lower vowels (Lieberman and Kubaska 1979). A commonly accepted hypothesis regarding the source of this trend is that vowel duration is in fact related to the duration of the gesture needed to produce the vowel (assuming a consonantal starting state where the tongue body is high, Turk et al 1994): it takes less time for the tongue to go from a state of (consonantal) obstruction to the gestural configuration of higher vowels (which is closer to an obstructed configuration) than to go to the gestural configuration of lower vowels (which is further from an obstructed configuration). Diachronically, a coarticulatory effect of (gradient) tongue height on vowel duration could be enhanced so that tongue height alone would not be sufficient to explain vowel duration but, rather, vowel duration would be further modulated depending on the vowel category (Toivonen 2015, Bermúdez-Otero 2010).

Other things being equal, does vowel height alone determine vowel duration?

In a wish to transcend the phonetics/phonology divide (Sóskuthy 2013; Ohala 1990; Ohala 2005), I refer to the set of disciplines that investigate the visual systems (signing) and sound systems (speech sounds) of the world’s languages with the term phonetology (from a combination of phonetics and phonology).Although this newly-coined term contains the Greek root phon- ‘sound’, its meaning is by no means restricted to the realm of spoken languages, as its definition makes explicit. Sign languages, and other communicative systems yet to be “discovered”, are included. The term phonetological system can be used as an umbrella term that covers both visual and sound systems.

Phonetology

The duration of vocalic segments is known to be affected by a variety of factors, from vowel category, to phonation of flanking consonants, to prosodic contexts.Research from a variety of disciplines focusses on how these factors affect vowel duration and how they interact among each other in their relationship with vowel duration.

Which factors determine the duration of vocalic segments?

While it is known that language attitudes and spaces of language use are linked to language competence, it is not clear how the former two interact in their relationship with language competence, and particularly so in minoritised speech communities.

Investigating the effect of spaces and language attitudes on competence in minoritised speech communities.

This is a general Research Problem about understanding human speech, as the human ability to use speech to communicate and as the individual manifestations of speech in the world's languages.

Organisation	Role	Department	Start date	End date
University of Edinburgh	Lecturer	Not specified	2021-10-04
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München	Postdoc Researcher	Not specified	2019-11-15	2021-09-30

Organisation	Degree/title	Department	Start date	End date
University of Manchester	Ph.D. in Linguistics	Not specified	2016-09-19	2020-06-29
University of York	M.A. in Phonetics and Phonology	Not specified	2015-09	2016-09
University of Pavia	ResMA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics	Not specified	2011	2013
Università degli Studi di Milano	BA in Classics with Oriental Studies	Not specified	2007	2011

Title	DOI	Published date
Northern Tosk Albanian	10.1017/S0025100322000044	2023-12
Multidimensional Signals and Analytic Flexibility: Estimating Degrees of Freedom in Human-Speech Analyses	10.1177/25152459231162567	2023-07
The decline of local anchoring: a quantitative investigation	10.1017/s1360674323000047	2023-04-12
Distance vs time. Acoustic and articulatory consequences of reduced vowel duration in Polish	10.1121/10.0005585	2021-07
Planting the seed for sound change: Evidence from real-time MRI of velum kinematics in German	10.1353/lan.2021.0020	2021
A cross cultural analysis of early prelinguistic gesture development and its relationship to language development	10.1111/cdev.13406	2020-08-05
Longer vowel duration correlates with greater tongue root advancement at vowel offset: Acoustic and articulatory data from Italian and Polish	10.1121/10.0000556	2020-01-28
An exploratory study of voicing-related differences in vowel duration as compensatory temporal adjustment in Italian and Polish	10.5334/gjgl.869	2019-11-14

Stefano Coretta

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