Contents: Introduction Chapter Phonetics as a branch of linguistics Aspects and units of phonetics Chapter Branches of phonetics Chapter Methods of phonetic analysis Conclusion Bibliography Introduction Phonetics

1. 2 Aspects and units of phonetics
Traditionally, phonetics has dealt with the positions and activities of the parts of the human body that produce speech sounds, with the transition from one position to another, and with the qualities and direction of the air stream that is emitted when a person speaks. All of these considerations come under the heading of articulatory phonetics. Left out of account are the speaker’s brain, which triggers speech acts, and the listener’s brain, which interprets the vocal message. Ideally, phonetics should begin with the study of the encoding of the speech sounds in human brain, and end with the study of their decoding in the hearer’s brain. Human speech is the result of a highly complicated series of events. Let us consider the speech chain, which may be diagrammed in simplified form like this:

Speaker's brain	Speaker's vocal tract	Transmission of sounds	Listener's ear	Listener's brain
		through air
1	2	3	4	5
linguistic	articulatory	acoustic	auditory	linguistic

The formation of the concept takes place in the brain of a speaker. This stage may be called psychological. The message formed within the brain is transmitted along the nervous system to the speech organs. Therefore, we may say that the human brain controls the behaviour of the articulating organs which effects in producing a particular pattern of speech sounds. This second stage may be called physiological. The movements of the speech apparatus disturb the air stream thus producing sound waves. Consequently, the third stage may be called physical or acoustic. Further, any communication requires a listener, as well as a speaker. So the last stages are the reception of the sound waves by the listener's hearing physiological apparatus, the transmission of the spoken message through the nervous system to the brain and the linguistic interpretation of the information conveyed.

The sound phenomena have different aspects:
(a) the articulatory aspect;
(b) the acoustic aspect;
(c) the auditory (perceptive) aspect;
(d) the functional (linguistic) aspect.
Now it is possible to show the correlation between the stages of the speech chain and the aspects of the sound matter.