The distribution of phonemes and phoneme sequences is shown to be the result of the interaction of semantic features. Each semantic feature has a phonological canonical form, and the probability of a word realizing a given semantic feature complex is inversely dependent on its distance from the canonical forms concerned. Each word is the maximum probability estimator of its semantic features. It is suggested that this relation may hold in all languages, and that it requires considerable revision of traditional views of the lexicon.
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