PHONETICS AND

PHONOLOGY
PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY AS A BRANCH OF
LINGUISTICS

Linguistics: scientific study of language and its structure

Four core areas

1- Phonetics and phonology: deal with speech sounds and the sound system
2- Morphology: covers the structure of words
3- Syntax: explains sentence patterns
4- Lexicology & semantics: describe the vocabulary or lexicon and explore
different aspects of meaning
OTHER BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS

Utilizing the core areas are various other branches of linguistics.

Most of these are interdisciplinary fields because they overlap with other sciences.

The first four branches are concerned with language variation

1- Dialectology
2- Sociolinguistics
3- Ethnolinguistics
4- Discourse analysis, text linguistics and stylisitcs

The next four branches are not concerned with language variation

1- Contrastive linguistics (describes similarities and differences between languages)

2- Psycholinguistics (explores mental aspects of language)
3- Neurolinguistics (investigates the connection between language and the nervous system)
4- Computational linguistics (some of its concerns are machine translation and automatic
speech recognition)
PHONETICS
PHONETICS divides utterances into individual speech sounds. It is
therefore exclusively concerned with what Ferdinand de Saussure calls
parole (actual language use).
Phonetics can be divided into three distinct phases:
1) Articulatory phonetics: describes how the speech organs in the vocal
tract are used to produce speech sounds.
2) Acoustic phonetics: Studies the physical properties of speech sounds
(the way in which the air vibrates as sounds pass from speaker to
listener (duration, frequency, intensity and quality of sounds)
3) Auditory phonetics: investigates the perception of speech sounds by
the listener (how the sounds are transmitted from the ear to the brain
and how they are processed).
 PHONOLOGY
PHONOLOGY deals with the speakers’ knowledge of the sound system of
a language. It is therefore exclusively concerned with what Ferdinand de
Saussure calls langue (a speech community’s shared knowledge of a
language).
Phonology can be devided into two branches:
1) Segmental phonology: is based on the segmentation of language into
individual speech sounds provided by phonetics. Unlike phonetics,
however, segmental phonology is not interested in the production, the
physical properties, or the perception of these sounds, but the function
and possible combinations of sounds within the sound system.
2) Suprasegmental phonology: (also called prosody) is concerned with
those features of pronunciation that cannot be segmented because they
extend over more than one segment or sound. Such features include stress,
rhythm, and intonation.
HOW DO WE WRITE DOWN SPOKEN
LANGUAGE?
1) TRADITIONAL SPELLING

To describe the sounds of a language variety we need a method of writing

down sounds as accurately as possible. The first method is the traditional
alphabetical spelling system (orthography) which relates speech sounds to
letters. However, in most languages the relationship between speech and
writing is not very consistent. In English one particular sound may be
represented by different letters or combinations of letters. For example, the
second sound in he is represented differently in see, sea, seize, people, key,
believe, etc. Conversely the same letters may indicate different sounds, such as
the a in dad, father, many, call, village, etc. According to one statistical
analysis, there are 13.7 different spellings per sound, and 3.5 sounds per letter.
And some letters, like b in debt, have no sound at all in certain words.
2) PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
If we want to write down speech sounds as accurately as possible, we
cannot depend on traditional spelling. We need a method that relates
sounds and letters or symbols more systematically: each sound must
be represented consistently by the same symbol, and, conversely,
there must be a separate symbol for each distinctive sound. Such a
one-to-one correspondence between speech and writing is referred to
as a phonographic relationship. The symbols that we use to represent
speech sounds in this manner are phonetic symbols. A whole set of
them form a phonetic alphabet. Marks that we can add to indicate
slight alterations to the usual value of a phonetic symbol are called
diacritics. The term phonetic transcritpion refers to the process of
writing down spoken language in phonetic symbols as well as to the
resultant written text.
THE INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET
The most widely used phonetic alphabet, and one that provides suitable
symbols for the sounds of any language, is the International Phonetic
Alphabet or IPA.
It was first published in 1889 by the International Phonetic Association
in France, and has since then been revised and corrected in various
ways, most recently in 1996. It was initially developed by a group of
phoneticians, including Daniel Jones. The abbreviation IPA stands for
both the alphabet and the association. The International Phonetic
Alphabet is used, with minor modifications, in almost all English-
language dictionaries, except for American Publications. The IPA does
not provide the means for a prosodic transcrition, that is, it cannot
indicate suprasegmental features like rhythm or intonation. Apart from
a mark to indicate stress, there is no generally agreed system for writing
down the prosody of speech.
While some IPA symbols have been specially devised, quite a few
look like ordinary Roman letters. They have probably been included
for purely practical reasons, such as the facilitation of the printing
process.
In order to distinguish phonetic symbols from letters, phonetic
symbols are enclosed either in square brackets [ ] if they are used to
represent a concrete utterance or in slashes // when they indicate
speech sounds as part of the sound system. Letters are enclosed
within pointed brackets < > or they appear in single quotation marks
or in italics. Thus, [p] represents an actual sound, /p/ indicates an
abstact sound and our shared knowledge of its function within the
sound system, and <p>, ‘p’, or p is an ordinary letter.