Stanisław Puppel
2. THE INTERACTIVE NATURE OF THE RESOURCES AS COMPONENTS OF THE UNIVERSAL MICROSYSTEM
An ecological and thus resource-based approach to language (and, in partic-ular, to phonology) must — of necessity — make an appeal to the concept of the ‘environment’ as a key notion within the ecological paradigm. In this re-spect, one is obliged to refer to J.J. GIBSON’S (1966, 1977, 1979, see also MICHAELS and CARELLO, 1981) seminal contribution to the shaping up of the ecological perspective in Western scientific endeavour where the leading role of the environment in animal and human behaviour has been properly emphasized.
One may thus say that within a broad Gibsonian perspective, information con-tained within a given resource (e.g. the space) is highly structured and as such it at the same time serves to specify the environment and its characteristics to an interacting animal or human agent.
The HCAs who are interacting in the process of communication by means of the audio-vocal modality are constrained by two dimensions of the micro en-vironmental resource, namely, the external dimension, and the internal dimen-sion. The external dimension comprises space understood as a topographic entity as well as a social entity. In addition, in the topographic sense, space is understood as a collection of points to be reached by a traversing entity (e.g.
the tongue moving within the oral cavity). The external dimension of muscular fitness comprises all the physical forces acting within the muscular complex (tonus, elasticity of muscular tissue, etc.). The external dimension of
reso-An ecological-ethnic approach to phonology: The problem of sharable... 101
Fig. 1.The ecological, social, and cultural embededness
B C
A
nance/audition, in turn, comprises all the acoustic effects connected with the movements of all the speech muscular complexes immersed, as it were, in the breathing mechanism and very much dependent on its control by a particular HCA. Finally, the external dimension of time comprises all the durational ef-fects connected with the production of various speech events.
The internal dimension of the above mentioned combined resources involves their mental mappings which is an important part of the mental determinants of human communicative behaviour. Both the external and internal dimensions constitute the combined physical-mental attributes of the universal microsystem to which any HCA has access and which the HCA coordinates with a high de-gree of precision in individual and highly idiosyncratic speech production be-haviours established in the process of first language acquisition and actively rehearsed thereafter.
3. CONCLUSIONS
The present paper may be concluded by stating that phonology as a distinct layer of natural language organization, interconnected with other layers, has the following three distinct traits:
(a) it is shaped ecologically as a complex interplay of the four basic re-sources: SFR, MFR, RFR, TFR; together, they form a universal microsystem;
(b) every HCA learns to manage the universally available resources in a complex process of first language acquisition which may be understood as a species-specific and socially embedded intervention into the universal microsystem resulting in the establishment of discrete (i.e. phonological) units of language organization;
(c) the management of the above resources by a particular HCA always ob-tains cultural (ethnic) framing according to the well established rules operant within a particular linguistic community;
(d) the management of the socially and culturally established phonological resources enjoys both ethnic and universal sharability.
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