Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics and Phonology

Key words: phonetics, phonology, introduction, difference, relationship, IPA, Consonants, Vowels,Phone, Phoneme, Allophone, Minimal Pair,

Phonological Rules

Introductions of Phonetics and Phonology

1. Phonetics

Phonetics and phonology are two branches of linguistics that deal primarily with the structure of human language sounds. Without them we will live as deaf or dumb. Phonetics is about the production of sounds, including the production of sound, that is how speech sounds a re actually made, transmitted and received, the description and classification of speech sounds. The study of sounds is divided into three main areas: Articulator Phonetics, Acoustic Phonetics and Perceptual Phonetics. Phonology studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. It deals with the sound system of a language by treating phoneme as the point of departure.

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds that the human voice is capable of creating whereas phonology is the study of a subset of those sounds that constitute language and meaning. The first focuses on chaos while the second focuses on order.

It approache s speech on different levels. “At one level, it studies organs such as tongue and larynx and their function in the production of speech. At another level, it focuses on the speech sounds produced by these organs by identifying and classifying the individual sounds. This is the domain of articulator phonetics. It also investigates the properties of the sound waves—acoustic phonetics. As speech is intended to be hard or perceived, it is therefore possible to focus on the way in which a listener analyses or processes a sound wave—auditory phonetics.

Study of Phonetics, we…d better know something about the speech organs. For example, their places their function during an air stream producing speech sounds and so on. The knowledge of speech organs can help us in the further learning of Phonetics

The most important part of Phonetics is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which analyses the speech sound in two ways—“the manners of articulation and the places of articulation”. IPA is the basic part of the lear ning of Phonology, too. We can?t learn consonants without it. There are some important consonants which we should remember their place in IPA, such as [p] voiceless bilabial plosive; [d] voiced alveolar plosive; [f] voiceless labiodentals fricative and so no, especially the English consonants.

----Consonants:

In the production of consonants at least two articulators are involved. The categories

of consonant are established on the basis of several factors: the actual relationship between the articulators and thus the way in which the air passes through certain parts of the vocal tract, known as the manner of articulation; and where in the vocal tract there is approximation, narrowing or the obstruction of air, known as the place of articulation. The manner of articulation: stop [p, b, t, d, k, g], nasal [m, n], fricative [f, v, si], approximant [w, j], lateral [l], trill [r], tap and flap, affricate [ts, dz, tr, dr]. The place of articulation: bilabial [p, b, m], labiodentals [f, v], dental, alveolar [t, d, n, s, z], post alveolar, retroflex, palatal [j], velar [k, g], uvular, pharyngeal, glottal [h]. Description: Three parameters to identify a consonant:

①place of articulation: place in the mouth where obstruction occurs.

②manners of articulation: ways in which articulation can be accomplished.

③state of vocal cords: voiced VS. Voiceless

--Vowels:

A vowel is a sound in spoken language pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. A vowel is also understood to be syllabic: an equivalent open but non-syllabic sound is called a semivowel. In all languages, vowels form the nucleus or peak of syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and (in languages which have them) coda. However, some languages also allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable. The description of English vowels needs to fulfill four basic requirements:

①the height of tongue raising (high, mid, low);

②the position of the highest part of the tongue (front, central, back);

③the length or tenseness of the vowels (tense vs. lax or long vs. short);

④the lip-rounding (rounded vs. unrounded)

2. Phonology

Phonology is about sound patterns. “It deals with the sound system of language by treating phoneme as the point of departure. A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of sound that can signal difference in meaning. English has approximately forty-five phonemes”.

Another thing we should know is that the sound segments can be grouped into consonants and vowels. V owels are the speech sound made without audible stopping of the breath by the tongue, lips and so on.

-- Phone: the speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic communication are all phones. It?s a phonetic unit or segment (in the mouth). Conventionally, phones are placed within square brackets “[]”(phonetic transcription). Phones do not necessarily distinguish meaning. Usually phones of different phonemes distinguish meaning.

--Phoneme: A sound which is capable of distinguishing one word or one shape of a word from another in a given language is a phoneme. It?s a basic unit in phonological analysis. It is not any particular sound, but an abstract segment. In actual speech, a phoneme is realized phonetically as a certain phone. The phoneme is the smallest meaning-distinguishing unit. Phonemes are placed in slashes “//” (phonemic transcription)

--Allophone: when we have a set of phones, all of which are versions of one phoneme, we refer to them as the allophones of that phoneme. One phoneme may have several allophones, but the choice of an allophone is rule-governed.

--Minimal Pair: When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment, which occurs in the same place in the strings, the two sound combinations are said to form a minimal pair. When two words such as pat and bat are identical in form except for a contrast in one phoneme, occurring in the same position, the two words are described as a minimal pair. Minimal pairs are established on the basis of sound and not spelling. Three requirements for a minimal pair:

①same number of segment

②one phonetic difference in the same place

③different meaning

--Phonological Rules

The rules contain three parts: class of sounds affected; phonetic change; phonemic environment. There are several rules. Devoice a voiced consonant after a voiceless consonant. Nasalize vowels before nasals. An alveolar stop becomes a flap when preceded by a stressed vowel and followed by an unstressed vowel. Voiceless stops are aspirated when they occur initially in a stressed syllable. They are called nasalization rule, tantalization rule, and valorization rule and so on. Egg. Voiced fricaive→voiceless /__ voiceless.

Difference between Phonetics and Phonology

However, there is difference between them. And they focus on different areas.

Phonetics focuses on the physical manifestations of speech sounds and on theories of speech production and perception.

Phonology is concerned with the systems of rules (or constraints) that determine how the sounds of a language combine and influence one another.

For an example: in [leap] and [peel], in phonetics, we focus on the [l].In [leap],[l] is a clear sound. However, in [peel], the [l] is a dark sound. In phonology, we focus on the letters and their positions.

The relationship between Phonetics and Phonology

Although they have difference, they influent each other in some degree.

Phonetics is the basic part Phonology when we learn linguistics. As we learn Phonology step by step we can find it connects with Phonetics closely. For example, consonants and vowels belong to the categories of Phonology, while the ways of telling or naming them bases on the principles of Phonetics.

First, we learn consonants by using IPA which belongs to Phonetics. From the definition of consonants we know that realizing how to pronounce them is the best way for us to learn them well. That means we should know enough knowledge about both the organs and the manners of articulation. “In the production of consonants at least two articulators are involved. The most important factors that the categories of consonants are established on are a) the actual relationship between the articulators and thus the way in which their passes through certain parts of the vocal tract—the manners of articulation and b) where in the vocal tract there is approximation, narrowing, or the obstruction of air-- the places of a rticulation” . And the two factors are the basic structures of IPA.

Second, the criteria of vowel description bassoon the position of tongue or the kind of opening made at the lips which are analyzed by Phonetics. Concretely, “the description of vowels needs to fulfill four criteria: the part of tongue that is raised—front, center, or back; the extent to which the tongue rises in the direction of the palate—mid-high, mid-low, and low; the kind of opening made at the lips—rounded or unrounded; the position of the soft palate—raised for oral vowels, and lowed for vowels which have been nasalized”.

At least since Trubetzkoy many have thought of phonology and phonetics as separate, largely autonomous, disciplines with distinct goals and distinct methodologies. Some linguists even seem to doubt whether phonetics is properly part of linguistics at all. The commonly encountered expression …the interface between phonology and phonetics? implies that the two domains are largely separate and interact only at specific, proscribed points.

Now I will attempt to make the case that phonetics is one of the essential areas of study for phonology. Without phonetics, I would maintain, (and allied empirical disciplines such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics) phonology runs the risk of being a sterile, purely descriptive and taxonomic, discipline; with phonetics it can achieve a high level of explanation and prediction as well as finding applications in areas such as language teaching, communication disorders, and speech technology.

In a word, phonetics is one of the disciplines that help to provide answers to phonology?s questions about why speech sounds behave as they do. Moreover, in its growth over the past couple of centuries it has developed a respectable level o f scientific rigor in creating and testing models of various aspects of the speech mechanism. Phonology can benefit from phonetics? methods, data, and theories. Reference: 胡壮麟《语言学教程》

语

言

学

论

文

题目：Phonetics and Phonology