Relating phonetic and phonological categories

Abstract

. Recent proposals to treat phonetic representations as the semantic interpretation of phonological representations are technically problematic to implement. The main di culty is that phonological representations are discrete while phonetic representations are continuous which makes the standard method of describing semantic interpretation as a homomorphism between sortally equivalent algebras hard to generalize. The paper solves the technical problem by introducing a notion of homomorphisms. First, the operation of concatenation is de ned in the usual way for strings and as `continuation' for continuous scalar-vector functions with nite support, and the set of phonetic representations is equipped with a measure. Next a.e. homomorphisms are rigorously de ned and the semantic relationship between phonological and phonetic categories is made explicit in terms of these homomorphisms. Finally constant target (triphone) models, which play a central role in speech recognition, are reconstructed in this semantic framework.