Salah Abdulhussein

Phonic substance
In phonetics, phonic substance as the name suggests, refers to the speech
sounds as a physical occurrence. Speech according to this term is seen as being
composed of a set of definable articulatory, acoustic and auditory properties.
Any discussion of phonic substance is about sounds (phones) which are the
concrete realizations of (phonemes). Phonemes as contrasted to phones are the
abstract minimal units in the sound system of a given language. However
phonic substance as a concept refers to speech as connected units and not as
single ones since the suprasegmental analysis of connected speech is different
from the analysis of single sound units.

Phonic substance is an important term in phonetics as it constitutes a source

of empirical datum significant for the theory of language. The importance lies in
the fact that the notion provides linguists with the phonetic facts of the sound
system of a given language, facts that are defined in acoustic, articulatory and
auditory terms. It follows then that phonic substance is physical level of
investigation. To illustrate this, phoneticians of English analyse stretches from
spoken English in order to give a descriptive account of the sound inventory of
English.

The word substance is not a new comer in linguistics, it was first proposed
by Ferdinand de Saussure to refer to the raw material through which language is
used as opposed to form which is the abstract pattern of relationships imposed
on substance by language. The concept of substance in language is arbitrary just
as the shape of the chess-piece is irrelevant to the game operation, so also are
the particular distinctions of shape or sound whereby the expression elements of
language are identified.
 Two types of substance can be distinguished with reference to the medium
of language used, the first and above mentioned one (Phonic substance) and the
graphic substance which is an analogous term to the phonic substance. The
graphic substance is used to refer to the use of language in written medium so
the substance of communication here requires special implement and
availability.

Finally, phonic substance is more important than graphic substance as the

former is more available, convenient, requires less tools and implement, as well
as it is more physically stable.

References

Lyons, J. (1968). Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Crystal, D.(2008). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. Blackwell

Publishing.