Abstract
It seems to be widely agreed that there must be some universal inventory of possible speech sounds and that these sound elements are inherently segmented despite evidence of many nonsegmental phonetic structures. It is argued here, however, that if a language is viewed as fundamentally a communication device for a community and phonetics is viewed as the signalling space for the language, then certain general constraints for speech sounds follow. For example, speech sounds must be invariant between gesture and sound and across members of the community. By employing the notion of symmetry, it is possible to define the notion of phonetic space in a theoretically useful way without having to specify any particular elements in it.
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