1. Phonetics and phonology

2.BRANCHES OF PHONETICS
Branches of phonetics correspond to four stages of pronunciation of sounds and syllables: speech organs move to produce sounds, sounds travel in the sound waves, the waves are received by ear and transmitted to the brain. Thus we distinguish the following branches of phonetics:
1. PHYSIOLOGICAL Phonetics – studies neurological, physiological basis of speech production. It studies quality and length of sounds, tamber/timber of voice (which shows people's emotions when they speak), intensity (force) of sounds, pitch (or rising/falling) of voice, pausations etc.
This branch of Phonetics uses a lot of physics laboratory equipment such as spectrographs, oscilographs and others.
2. ARTICULATORY Phonetics - studies the way air is set in motion to produce speech sounds, the movements of organs of speech. Articulatory phonetics is the most valuable for teaching, as it describes proper ways of speech organ positions to produce a sound;
3. ACOUSTIC Phonetics – studies characteristics of sound waves that transmit speech sounds, the way air vibrates between the speaker’s mouth and the listener’s ear. It studies means we use to discriminate sounds: pitch of voice; loudness; intensity or force of sounds; their length and quality. This branch of Phonetics uses a lot of physics laboratory equipment such as spectrograms, oscilograms, intonograms etc. It begins to play a growing part in language teaching because computer multimedia pronunciation training programmes use spectrograms to build up correct pronunciation skills.
4. AUDITORY Phonetics – studies the hearing process, how speech is received by ear.
Besides, according to the subject and area a branch of Phonetics covers, we distinguish:
1. GENERAL PHONETICS - is part of general linguistics which is concerned with the study of production human speech and functioning of speech mechanism.
General phonetics
• establishes phonetic regularities common for human languages in general;
• includes a number of theories, which are true for a group of languages, e.g. the phoneme theory, the theory of syllable formation, of stress, of intonation • establishes the types of speech sounds in various languages, the way they are produced and the role they play in speech;
• uses data provided by special phonetics of different languages and disciplines like speech pathology, psychology, etc.
2. SPECIAL PHONETICS deals with the study of one language. It falls into:
a) descriptive phonetics which studies the sounds of the given language at a particular
period of time (that is synchronically);
b) historic phonetics which studies the sounds of the given language in their historical development (that is diachronically).
3. THEORETICAL PHONETICS applies the theories formulated by General Phonetics to the language it analyses.
4. COMPARATIVE PHONETICS is concerned with the comparative study of phonetic systems of two or more languages.
5. PRACTICAL OR APPLIED PHONETICS deals with the application of phonetic theories to other fields of language study, e.g. methodology of language teaching, logopedics, dialectology, surdo-pedagogy, etc.
6. PHONOLOGICAL/FUNCTIONAL PHONETICS is a purely linguistic branch of phonetics. It studies functional properties of phonemes, syllables, accent and intonation by means of special linguistic methods, which help to interpret them as socially significant elements.

1.