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In addition to these shared features, there are other features that
are partly shared, present in some of the six, but not all: lip-

rounding or stretching, lateral tongue curl, retracted tongue tip.
The features which are present in all the allophones are distinctive

features; those which are present in one or several but not all the
allophones are redundant features.

A taxonomy of units of language vs. speech from largest to
smallest can be presented in the table that follows:

Table 1
LANGUAGE SPEECH

Text Discourse
Sentence Utterance

Phrase/sense-group/syntagma Tone unit /intonation group

Word, morpheme Rhythmic group/phonetic
word/foot

– Syllable

Phoneme Segment/allophone
Distinctive feature Articulatory feature

4.3 Phonetics and phonology

Phonetics and phonology are two branches of linguistics that
deal primarily with the structure of human language sounds.

Phonetics focuses on the physical manifestations of speech sounds
and on theories of speech production and perception. Phonology is

concerned with the systems of rules (or constraints) that determine

how the sounds of a language combine and influence one another.
Phonology may also be thought of as a collection of phonemes

and a collection of rules for putting these units together to express
the meanings of morphemes, words, phrases, sentences and texts

which are the units used in describing language.

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