1. Phonetics and phonology

Plan:

1. 
   Phonetics and phonology
   
2. 
   Branches of phonetics
   
3. 
   Branches and Divisions of Phonetics
   
4. 
   Connection of Phonetics with other branches of linguistics
   
5. 
   Methods of Phonetic Analysis
   

1. Phonetics and phonology
Although our species has the scientific name Homo sapiens, ‘thinking human’, it has often been suggested that an even more appropriate name would be Homo loquens, or ‘speaking human’. Many species have soundbased signalling systems, and can communicate with other members of the same species on various topics of mutual interest, like approaching danger or where the next meal is coming from. Most humans (leaving aside for now native users of sign languages) also use sounds for linguistic signalling; but the structure of the human vocal organs allows a particularly wide range of sounds to be used, and they are also put together in an extraordinarily sophisticated way.
There are two subdisciplines in linguistics which deal with sound, namely phonetics and phonology.
Phonetics provides objective ways of describing and analysing the range of sounds humans use in their languages. More specifically, articulatory phonetics identifies precisely which speech organs and muscles are involved in producing the different sounds of the world’s languages. Those sounds are then transmitted from the speaker to the hearer, and acoustic and auditory phonetics focus on the physics of speech as it travels through the air in the form of sound waves, and the effect those waves have on a hearer’s ears and brain. It follows that phonetics has strong associations with anatomy, physiology, physics and neurology.
However, although knowing what sounds we can theoretically make and use is part of understanding what makes us human, each person grows up learning and speaking only a particular human language or languages, and each language only makes use of a subset of the full range of possible, producible and distinguishable sounds. When we turn to the characteristics of the English sound system that make it specifically English, and different from French or Welsh or Quechua, we move into the domain of phonology, which is the language-specific selection and organisation of sounds to signal meanings. Phonologists are interested in the sound patterns of particular languages, and in what speakers and hearers need to know, and children need to learn, to be speakers of those languages: in that sense, it is close to psychology.
The relationship between phonetics and phonology is a complex one, but we might initially approach phonology as narrowed-down phonetics. Within a language, subtle mechanical analysis of speech reveals that every utterance of the same word, even by the same speaker, will be a tiny fraction different from every other; yet hearers who share that language will effortlessly identify the same word in each case. In this sense, phonetics supplies an embarrassment of riches, providing much more information than speakers seem to use or need: all those speakers, and every utterance different! Phonology, on the other hand, involves a reduction to the essential information, to what speakers and hearers think they are saying and hearing. According to the conception of the Prague Linguistic School phonetics and phonology are two independent branches of science, phonetics is a biological science which is concerned with the physical and physiological characteristics of speech sounds, and phonology is a linguistic science which is concerned with the social functions of different phonetic phenomena. Another term for this branch is functional phonetics.
Phonetics is a basic branch – many would say the most fundamental branch of linguistics, because it gives a language a definite form. The vocabulary and grammar of a language can function only when the language has a phonetic form. So grammar and vocabulary depend on phonetics, they cannot exist outside of phonetics, because all lexical and grammar phenomena are expressed phonetically. Neither linguistic theory nor linguistic description can do without phonetics and is complete without it.
Phonetics, being a branch of linguistics, occupies a peculiar position. On the one hand it serves as a means of expressing grammatical and lexical phenomena. On the other hand it has laws of its own which are independent of grammar and vocabulary. Besides it is closely connected with a number of other sciences, such as physics, biology, physiology, psychology etc. The more phonetics develops the more various branches of science become involved in the field of phonetic investigation.
Our further point will be made on the branches and divisions of phonetics.