Branches and Divisions of Phonetics

Everyone who starts learning a foreign language first of all is introduced into practical or normative phonetics. It studies the material form of phonetic phenomena in relation to meaning. It teaches how to pronounce sounds correctly and what intonation to use to convey this or that meaning or emotion. It is called normative because we are to teach the "norm" of English pronunciation.

Theoretical phonetics is mainly concerned with the functioning of phonetic units in the language. It discusses the problems of phonetics in academic terms and gives a scientific approach to the phonetic theory.

Other two important branches of phonetics are special and general phonetics. Special phonetics may be subdivided into descriptive and historical. Special descriptive phonetics is concerned with the study of the phonetic structure of one language only in its static form, synchronically and the domain of special historical phonetics is the phonetic structure of a language in its historical development, diachronically. Historical phonetics is part of the history of a language. Its aim is to trace and establish the successive changes in the phonetic system of a given language at different stages of its historical development. It is very important for the study of the modern phonetic system because without a historical approach it is impossible to understand how this modern phonetic system has developed and what further changes it is likely to undergo.

General phonetics studies all the sound-producing possibilities of the human speech apparatus and the ways they are used for purposes of human communication by means of language, it finds out what types of speech sounds exist in various languages of the world, how they are produced and what role they play in forming and expressing thoughts; it also determines the nature, types and role of other phonetic means, such as word stress and intonation. General phonetics is based on the material which the special phonetics of a great number of languages provides; it also uses data of other sciences: physics, biology, psychology, speech pathology, etc. So it makes a number of general conclusions concerning the complex nature of speech sounds, analyses phonetic phenomena from different points of view and formulates phonetic theories. On the one hand general phonetics is based on the data of special phonetics; on the other hand it provides valuable theoretical material which enables us to understand and to interpret correctly different phonetic phenomena of concrete languages.

Another important division is into phonology and phonetics. According to the conception of the Prague Linguistic School phonetics and phonology are two independent branches of science, phonetics is a biological science which is concerned with the physical and physiological characteristics of speech sounds, and phonology is a linguistic science which is concerned with the social functions of different phonetic phenomena. Another term for this branch is functional phonetics.

The father of Phonology is Prince Nicholas Trubetskoi. His work "Fundementals of Phonology" separates phonetics and phonology, saying that they are not related and that phonetics is not part of linguistics, but a biological science that deals only with the physiological aspect of speech sounds.

Nevertheless it doesn't seem logical to separate function from phonetic forms, thus excluding phonetics from the linguistic sciences. So nowadays most phoneticians consider both phonetics and phonology part of linguistics.

Phonetics itself is subdivided into 3 sub branches, each dealing with special aspects of sounds, their production by a speaker and perception by a listener.

Phonetic processing starts on a neurophonetic level, in the brain of a speaker, where the formation of the concept takes place. The human brain controls the behaviour of the articulatory (or speech) organs and makes them move in a particular way. The branch of phonetics which is concerned with the study of speech sounds as regards their production by the human speech organs is called articulatory (physiological) phonetics. In other words it deals with the way human organs join to produce sounds. Articulatory basis of a language is a set of articulation tendencies characteristic for a particular language community, so articulatory gesturing is culturally specific and not universal.

Different articulations produce different acoustic effects, or different speech sounds. Consequently, speech sounds have a second aspect, a physical or, more exactly, an acoustic one, which constitutes the domain of acoustic phonetics. Acoustic phonetics involves knowledge of physics as it deals with the physical property of sounds. Any sound is a pressure disturbance transmitted through an elastic medium. When articulatory gesturing starts it causes disturbance (a sound wave) in the medium, which is transmitted from one particle of the medium to another and is reproduced as a sound wave travels from the source to the listener.

Perceptual or auditory phonetics is concerned with the way our auditory mechanism works to process speech information. There is a boundary line between reception (which doesn't involve understanding) and perception (which involves decoding and understanding). Phonetic perception is a product of sensation and interpretation of speech elements which take place in a human brain.

Phonetics is also divided into two major components: segmental phonetics, which is concerned with individual sounds ("segments" of speech) and suprasegmental phonetics whose domain is larger units of connected speech: syllables, words, phrases and texts.

There are a number of other divisions of phonetics. We may speak about comparative phonetics whose aims are to study the correlation between the phonetic systems of two or more languages and find out the correspondences between speech sounds and intonation structures. Its data are extremely useful in teaching and learning a foreign language as they show differences and similarities of the phonetic systems of two or more languages and predict possible difficulties for the learners. It should be mentioned thatthe most difficult phonetic phenomena are those absent in the mother tongue. For example, the sounds [ð-θ] cause a lot of difficulties for the Russian students of English, as there are no sounds with similar articulations in the Russian language. On the other hand the most stable and persistent pronunciation mistakes are made in those phenomena which are similar in the two languages but not exactly the same. For example, falling intonation. In English it goes to the very bottom of the voice, while in Russian it is not so steep and it does not reach the same low note as in English.

The data of applied phonetics are essential for practical purposes in speech therapy and logopedia. It helps to correct speech defects and to teach deaf-mutes (or people who do not speak as a result of an accident or some disease) to speak.

Experimental phonetics deals with research work which is carried out with the help of different technical devices, machines for measurements and for instrumental analysis.

Phonetics as a whole and all of its branches have not come into being all at once: they developed gradually, and their development was closely connected with and determined by the development of other branches of linguistics and other sciences.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-04