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:
It is a dynamic system (Thelen & Smith 2006; Vihman 2014, Capra & Luisi 2018).
It is a physio-neuro-cognitive system. It has:
A physical component (Ohala 1990; Ohala 2005).
A neuro-cognitive component.
It is rich in details (Johnson 1997; Pierrehumbert 2001; Bybee 2002).
It is self-organising and emergent (Wedel 2007; Wedel 2011).
It uses both stored exemplars and stored abstractions at multiple levels (Ambridge 2020).
It is part of a complex socio-cultural system (Boer 2015; Foulkes & Docherty 2006; Thompson, Kirby & Smith 2016).
I also consider these statements to be extendible more generally to linguisticality (Haspelmath 2020) as a holistic system.