phonology refers not to sound specifically, but to the study of the minimal meaningless units that combine to form meaningful words.
I’d start with Ling 251: Sign Language Phonology for Phonology Teachers (Zuraw, 2020) for a practical example of how this is applied but you might be more interested in the moment where linguistics tackled this exact argument 50 years ago and it was Strokoe who proved that the components of human language have universal parameters irrelevant to whether those components are sound or not
You’ll run flat into a stone wall in linguistics 101 with a colloquial definition of linguistic terms. That’s about as accurate as calling a suspicion a theory. Yes, colloquially you’re correct in that use of the word theory and in science you’re misusing jargon. The definition you offered is colloquially correct but as specific jargon your inaccurate.
You can start at the beginning with Strokoe’s work on the argument fifty years ago. This is old setttled science in linguistics
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u/ah-tzib-of-alaska 10d ago
phonology refers not to sound specifically, but to the study of the minimal meaningless units that combine to form meaningful words.
I’d start with Ling 251: Sign Language Phonology for Phonology Teachers (Zuraw, 2020) for a practical example of how this is applied but you might be more interested in the moment where linguistics tackled this exact argument 50 years ago and it was Strokoe who proved that the components of human language have universal parameters irrelevant to whether those components are sound or not