Levels of phonetic investigation

Topic: Levels of phonetic investigation
Plan

1. 
   What is phonetic investigation?
   
2. 
   What are the methods of phonetic investigation?
   
3. 
   What are the methods of investigating the sound matter of the language?
   
4. 
   What branch of phonetics are phonetic styles investigated by?
   

Abstract
This paper investigates the controversial issue of the relationship between Phonetics and Phonology . Throughout literature , there are different views and opinions that tackle this relationship , but none of them is adopted as the acceptable one . This is so because each has evidence as well as its merits and demerits . Generally , three main views about the relationship between phonetics and phonology can be introduced : they are the same , they are different but arbitrarily related , they are different but conditionally integrated .. Key Words : Phonology , phonetics , well - integrated , estranged, reintegrated.
Introduction
Phonology deals with sound structure in individual languages: the way distinctions in sound are used to differentiate linguistic items, and the ways in which the sound structure of the ‘same’ element varies as a function of the other sounds in its context. Phonology and phonetics both involve sound in natural language, but differ in that phonetics deals with sounds from a language-independent point of view,
while phonology studies the ways in which they are distributed and deployed within particular languages. Phonology originated with the insight that much observable phonetic detail is irrelevant or predictable within the system of a given language. This led to the positing of phonemes as minimal contrastive sound units in language, each composed (according to many writers) of a collection of distinctive features of contrast. Later work showed that a focus on surface contrast ultimately was misguided, and generative phonology replaced this with a conception of phonology as an aspect of speakers' knowledge of linguistic structure. Important research problems have involved the relation between phonological and phonetic form; the mutual interaction of phonological regularities; the relation of phonological structure to other components of grammar; and the appropriateness of rules vs. constraints as formulations of phonological regularities.

Phonology refers to the sound system of a language. In general, the basic unit of phonology is the phoneme, which is an individual speech sound (such as /p/) that can often be represented by a single grapheme, or letter (such as the letter p). There are, however, exceptions, such as the sound /sh/, which is represented by two graphemes (sh). Each natural language has a different set of possible sounds that can be combined to create words. Early in speech and language development, children's vocalizations are indistinguishable, regardless of their linguistic environment. Ultimately, however, they develop a repertoire of sounds and rules for their combination that are specific to the language to which they are predominantly exposed. Phonological processing is necessary for both comprehension and production of speech and language. It is also critically involved in processing written word forms for reading and spelling. Thus, individuals with phonological processing disorders may present with impaired spoken as well as written language skills.

Phonology is typically defined as “the study of speech sounds of a language or languages, and the laws governing them,”¹ particularly the laws governing the composition and combination of speech sounds in language. This definition reflects a segmental bias in the historical development of the field and we can offer a more general definition: the study of the knowledge and representations of the sound system of human languages. From a neurobiological or cognitive neuroscience perspective, one can consider phonology as the study of the mental model for human speech. In this brief review, we restrict ourselves to spoken language, although analogous concerns hold for signed language (Brentari, 2011). Moreover, we limit the discussion to what we consider the most important aspects of phonology. These include: (i) the mappings between three systems of representation: action, perception, and long-term memory; (ii) the fundamental components of speech sounds (i.e., distinctive features); (iii) the laws of combinations of speech sounds, both adjacent and long-distance; and (iv) the chunking of speech sounds into larger units, especially syllables.
To begin, consider the word-form “glark.” Given this string of letters, native speakers of English will have an idea of how to pronounce it and what it would sound like if another person said it. They would have little idea, if any, of what it means.² The meaning of a word is arbitrary given its form, and it could mean something else entirely. Consequently, we can have very specific knowledge about a word’s form from a single presentation and can recognize and repeat such word-forms without much effort, all without knowing its meaning. Phonology studies the regularities of form (i.e., “rules without meaning”) (Staal, 1990) and the laws of combination for speech sounds and their sub-parts.
Any account needs to address the fact that speech is produced by one anatomical system (the mouth) and perceived with another (the auditory system). Our ability to repeat new word-forms, such as “glark,” is evidence that people effortlessly map between these two systems. Moreover, new word-forms can be stored in both short-term and long-term memory. As a result, phonology must confront the conversion of representations (i.e., data structures) between three broad neural systems: memory, action, and perception (the MAP loop; Poeppel & Idsardi, 2011). Each system has further sub-systems that we ignore here. The basic proposal is that this is done through the use of phonological primitives (features), which are temporally organized (chunked, grouped, coordinated) on at least two fundamental time scales: the feature or segment and the syllable.

Phonology – What Is It About?

Phonology is that part of language which comprises the systematic and functional properties of sound in language. The term ‘phonology’ is also used, with the ambiguity also found with other terms used for the description of languages, for the study of those systematic features of sound in language. In this sense, it refers to a subdiscipline of linguistics. It was the first such subdiscipline in which the view of language as an object with particular structural properties was developed successfully. Phonology seeks to discover those systematic properties in the domain of sound structure, and find the regularities and principles behind it both for individual languages and for language in general. More recently, phonology has become considerably diversified and has found a number of applications.
The emphasis on systematicity in the definition above derives from the observation that behind the infinitely varying properties of each token of speech there is an identifiable set of invariant, recurring, more abstract properties. The hypothesis that such a phonological system exists is largely due to Saussure (see Saussure, 1916) and to the phonologists of the early structuralist school, both in Europe (the Prague school and the British school) and in the United States (American structuralism); see the survey by Anderson (1985).
Phonology, from its beginnings, has stood in a close, but sometimes strained, relation to the other science of linguistic sounds, phonetics. Phonetics studies the concrete, physical features of sound in language, often called speech. As the function of phonology is to make linguistic items, which are represented by rather abstract symbols, pronounceable and understandable, it is intimately related to phonetics. But while phonetics is interested in the concrete, continuously varying features of articulation, sound transmission (acoustics), and auditory perception, the subject of phonology is thought to be a set of discrete, symbolic categories which belong to the cognitive, and not the physical, domain. This distinction can be interpreted either as a rather strict and principled one, or as one which is gradual and of less importance.
Experimental phonetics employs the methods of investigation commonly used in other disciplines—e.g., physics, physiology, and psychology—for measuring the physical and physiological dimensions of speech sounds and their perceptual characteristics. The sound spectrograph and speech synthesizers were mentioned in the section on acoustic phonetics. Other techniques include the use of X-rays; air-pressure and air-flow recording; palatography, a method of registering the contacts between the tongue and the roof of the mouth; and cinematography. All of these techniques have been used for studying the actions of the vocal organs.
Much of the work in experimental phonetics has been directed toward obtaining more accurate descriptions of the sounds that characterize different languages. There have also been several studies aimed at determining the relative importance of different features in signalling contrasts between sounds. But experimental phoneticians are probably most concerned with trying to discover the central cerebral processes involved in speech.

the relationship between phonetics and phonology seems shaky and confused . Put it differently , no clear - cut borderline has been observed . There are different views which sometimes differentiate between the two fields whereas other times they are integrated into one field . The following paragraphs clarify . One of the ancient classifications of phonetics is that of taxonomic and scientific . As regards taxonomic phonetics , it concerns with uniformity in naming and the classifying human speech sounds or phonemes and transcribingsuch phonemes . Eventually , this type of phonetics has led to the emergence of the IPA which provided the basis for a vocabulary ( Fant , 1960 ; Lindblom , 1986 and Stevens , 1989 ) . In addition to its phonetic nature , taxonomic phonetics represents a system to describe phonological universals and offers phonetic explanation for sound change ( Ohala , 1981b , 1986a ; Ohala and Feder , 1987 ) . On the other hand , scientific phoneticsaims to understand how speech works at all layers from the brain or mind of the utterer to the brain or mind of the auditor ( Chiba and Kajima , 1941 ) . Nevertheless , it holds phonology for its role to deliver vocabulary for stating phonological generalities . Moreover , during 17th , 18th , and 19th centuries , it is viewed that scientific phonetics is fully integrated withinphonology . There are examples where traditional phonological ( linguistic ) questions are offered phonetically based answers or where the same individual is equally productive in scientific phonetics and phonology in general . For de Saussure , the phonological structure has not given a considerable attention . In this sense , he ( 1878 ) posited the existence of sounds in Proto - Indo - European . In the early 20thcentury , de Saussure learned that beside the observable facts of a language's sounds there was also an underlying reality . Gradually , linguists got adapted to the idea that there could be ever more abstract representations and processes for speech sounds which could describe their behaviour and which were distinct from phonetic representation and processes.

It is argued that a satisfactory global theory of intonation will require four levels of analysis : (i) physical(acoustic, physiological) (ii) phonetic (iii) surface phonological and (iv) deep phonological. Thetheoretical and cognitive status of each level is discussed and specific proposals are made for a modelrespecting such an overall architecture as well as a condition of interpretability which requires that eachlevel of representation be interpretable in terms of adjacent levels. The level of phonetic representation isconceived of as providing an interface between abstract cognitive representations and their physicalmanifestations. This level is also assumed to provide an interface between constraints on production andperception. For fundamental frequency an algorithm, MOMEL, for the automatic derivation of arepresentation as a sequence of target-points is presented. The level of surface phonological representation is seen as the prosodic equivalent of the International Phonetic Alphabet for phonemic representation. A symbolic coding system for fundamental frequency patterns (INTSINT) is described which is currently being used for the automatic coding of fundamental frequency patterns for continuous texts in a number of different languages. The level of deep phonological representation is described as the level of linguistically significant choices which interact with a number of language-specific prosodic parameters to generate observed intonation patterns.
The linguistic description of the intonation systems of different languages, like that of any other aspect of language, can be thought of as a rather indirect process of extracting linguistic information from measurable physical data. As has long been known, there is no automatic technique for performing this operation. As Chomsky (1964) has pointed out, there is no general 'discovery procedure' we can appeal to. The development of large corpus-based studies and the introduction of widely available automatic modelling techniques do, however, bring the hope that our knowledge of these systems may increase significantly over the next few years. One of the reasons for this is that as we increase our database we are able to formulate and test more and more empirical predictions about the data. The comparison of the predictions with the observed data in turn leads us to formulate more constrained hypotheses about the nature of the phonological representations we hope to bring to light. At the same time, the development of studies dealing with inter-speaker and intra-speaker variability will teach us more and more about the way in which prosodic systems can vary within the same language or dialect. Similarly it can be expected that the availability of comparable data derived from descriptions of a number of different languages or dialects will enable us to separate out with more and more confidence the language-specific from the universal characteristics of prosodic systems and this will allow us once more to formulate considerable constraints on the nature of these systems. It must be emphasised that this continuous dialogue between empirical data and linguistic theory is at each step a process of formulating hypotheses on the basis of available data and of testing these on new data. All hypotheses involved are, naturally, only provisional and are liable to be questioned at all times. The higher the degree of abstraction of a hypothesis, however, the greater the quantity of data necessary before we call it into question and look for a better hypothesis to replace it. This means that the fact that different teams of researchers work with different theoretical backgrounds, far from being a handicap, is in fact a guarantee that research is not confined to what may after all turn out to be a blind
alley. In this paper we formulate a general picture of an overall phonological and phonetic description of intonation and we then make a number of specific proposals for implementing the different levels of representation. Much of this material has been presented elsewhere but we are grateful to the editor for this opportunity to present an overall synthesis here.
Levels of representation and levels of analysis
It is obvious that we need to distinguish at least two levels of representation (cf 't Hart & Collier 1975).At the most abstract linguistic level we want to be able to represent somehow the knowledge that a speaker needs to acquire when he learns a language. At the other extreme, we want to relate such a representation to the physical manifestations of this linguistic knowledge : the corresponding acoustic and physiological characteristics of utterances. Although the distinction between abstract linguistic representations and concrete physical representations is fairly uncontroversial, different approaches tend to differ in the relative importance which they attach to each of these two levels
We can note that in these two cases the term 'representation' is not being used in strictly the same way. When we refer to linguistic representations, we assume that we are describing, however component and its relation to pragmatic interpretation. There are a number of very important issues at stake here but which would obvously take us far beyond the scope of this chapter. For discussion see It can be seen from the above diagrams that a phonological representation must fulfill two purposes : it must provide both the information necessary for the pronunciation of an utterance and the information necessary for its syntactic and semantic interpretation. This in fact provides us with a useful constraint which we shall refer to as the 'Interpretability Condition' and which states. Representations at all intermediate levels must be interpretable at both adjacent levels : the more abstract and the more concrete.
There is nothing in what we have said so far which is specific to intonation. In the case of lexical items, for example, this framework embodies the insights of de Saussure 1916concerning the double nature of the linguistic sign as an arbitrary association between signifiant and signifié. In the case of prosody and intonation, we can usefully make a similar distinction between functional representations which encode the information necessary for the syntactic and semantic interpretation of the prosody of an utterance and formal representations which encode the prosodic information necessary for its pronunciation. Most systems of transcription for intonation mix functional and formal characteristics and it is of course an empirical question whether these should be encoded in separate representations or not. The fact that different languages make use of different prosodic forms for encoding the same prosodic functions seems to us evidence, though, that they should be separated : the inventories of prosodic forms and prosodic functions might then both be part of universal linguistic theory while the specific mapping between forms and functions in any given language would be defined by language specific parameters. An example of such a difference is the distinction between lexical and non-lexical use of prosody in different languages. It has often been noted that there are no specific acoustic characteristics which distinguish languages which make use of lexically distinctive stress and tone from other languages which do not. Thus, there is no obvious acoustic cue which would allow us to distinguish stressed syllables in languages with 'free' or 'distinctive' stress (English, Russian etc.) from those in languages with 'fixed' or 'non-distinctive' stress (French, Polish, Finnish etc). Presumably the (surface) phonological representation of stress is the same in both types of languages. Similarly, in tone languages (Chinese, Yoruba etc), we can assume that at least some of the melodic characteristics of utterances are lexically determined. It has however become standard in recent years to formulate phonological models of intonation which derive intonation patterns in non-tone languages from phonological tones, together with appropriate rules specifying how they are aligned with the accented syllables. This suggests the fascinating possibility that phonological representations in all languages draw from a universal set of prosodic characteristics which are either lexically specified or which are introduced in conformity with language specific parameters and which are subsequently mapped onto phonetic characteristics. Once again it is an empirical question whether phonetic representation is a distinct level or whether, as suggested by Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988), we should think of phonetics rather as a dynamic interpretative process mapping phonology directly onto acoustics and physiology. Whatever the theoretical status of phonetic representation, we believe that it is a useful heuristic strategy to postulate a distinctive level of phonetic representation which can then be mapped (following the interpretability condition) onto both physics and phonology. As Pierrehumbert & Beckman themselves put it : “the division of labor between the phonology and the phonetics is an empirical question, which can only be decided by constructing complete models in which the role of both in describing the sound structure is made explicit." We can note that the term 'phonetic representation' has at times been used to cover a number of different phenomena which really need to be distinguished. Phonetics is sometimes used as a synonym for acoustics and physiology. It should be clear that we wish to distinguish these levels of analysis. Phonetics is also sometimes used as a synonym for 'surface phonology' as in the terms 'phonetic transcription' or the 'International Phonetic Alphabet'. For Trubetskoy (1949), the distinction between phonology and phonetics is one between discrete and continuous phenomena. In this sense then a 'phonetic transcription' would more appropriately be termed a 'surface phonological transcription'. Between the underlying phonological representation and the physical representation we wish then to postulate two distinct levels : the level of surface phonology and the level of phonetics. The level of surface phonology is a level of distinctive discrete categories with which we can describe surface phenomena cross-linguistically. The level of phonetics is the level of continuously variable phenomena from which we have factored out universal constraints on the production and perception of sounds. We can illustrate these distinctions with the example of durational characteristics. Duration is often referred to as one of the three prosodic acoustic parameters, the other two being fundamental frequency and intensity. Unlike the other parameters, however, duration is not purely acoustic : it is impossible for a machine to produce something like a 'duration curve' in the same way that machines can produce intensity curves or
Experimental phonetics employs the methods of investigation commonly used in other disciplines—e.g., physics, physiology, and psychology—for measuring the physical and physiological dimensions of speech sounds and their perceptual characteristics. The sound spectrograph and speech synthesizers were mentioned in the section on acoustic phonetics. Other techniques include the use of X-rays; air-pressure and air-flow recording; palatography, a method of registering the contacts between the tongue and the roof of the mouth; and cinematography. All of these techniques have been used for studying the actions of the vocal organs.
Much of the work in experimental phonetics has been directed toward obtaining more accurate descriptions of the sounds that characterize different languages. There have also been several studies aimed at determining the relative importance of different features in signalling contrasts between sounds. But experimental phoneticians are probably most concerned with trying to discover the central cerebral processes involved in speech.