phonology

Present-tense removal test (Laws 8, 8b); pinned sense: a discipline whose object of analysis is language. Remove language now — does phonology stop operating? Yes: per its accepted carve, phonology is the discipline that studies 'the sound systems of languages' — its object is language itself. Without language there is no sound system to inventory, no distinctive unit to isolate by minimal-pair contrast, no phonotactic constraint or phonological rule to state; the discipline's operations have nothing to operate on and the field ceases to operate. This is the same relation the board has already accepted for its sister disciplines: morphology DEPENDS_ON language, pragmatics DEPENDS_ON language, linguistics DEPENDS_ON language. Not DERIVED_FROM (no chronology claim is made), not SERVES (the discipline's operations are analysis, not service rendered for language's sake).

Pinned sense (Law 11d): the discipline of sound-system analysis (phonology) was historically derived from the earlier discipline of physical sound description (phonetics). Which-came-first test (Law 7): phonetics as a systematic science predates phonology — the International Phonetic Alphabet was created in 1888, the Neogrammararians' sound-law work began in the 1870s, and physical articulatory/acoustic description was well-established before Saussure's structural distinction between synchronic and diachronic (1916) and the Prague School's formulation of phonology as the study of sound systems (1920s-30s). Phonetics existed first and fed into phonology: the structural approach to language reorganized the physical sound data that phonetics had collected into abstract systemic categories (phonemes, allophones, phonotactics).

Specific to its nearest accepted kind (Laws 9, 11e); pinned sense: a discipline of linguistics. Phonology, per its accepted carve, is 'a human-made discipline of linguistics that studies the sound systems of languages' — one named subfield of the parent discipline, in exactly the relation the board's accepted siblings stand in: morphology, semantics, syntax, pragmatics, lexicography, and even phonetics each INSTANCE_OF linguistics. A competent linguist calls phonology 'a subfield of linguistics' — a specific kind of the general discipline, and linguistics is the nearest live kind (no finer accepted kind sits between subfield and parent). INSTANCE_OF, never CONTAINS: a subfield is a specific kind of the discipline, not a part contained in it.

Pinned sense (Law 11d): an allophone as a phonological category — the contextual variant of a phoneme within a language's sound system. DEPENDS_ON removal test (Law 8/8b): remove phonology — the discipline that inventories sound systems, isolates distinctive units, and categorizes contextual variants — and the concept of allophones vanishes. Per its accepted definition, an allophone is 'a human-made phonological category' indexed to a phoneme and defined by complementary distribution within a language's system. The category itself is created by phonological analysis; without the discipline that produces this categorization, the concept has no existence. This is object-level: allophones are not physical sounds (those belong to phonetics) but the phonological categories assigned to them. Constitutive dependency.