Phonetics and Social Sciences

So our further point should be made in connection with the relationship between phonetics and social sciences. Language is not an isolated phenomenon; it is a part of society. No branch of linguistics can be studied without taking into consideration at least the study of other aspects of society. In the past two decades we have seen the development of quite distinct interdisciplinary subjects, such as sociolinguistics (and sociophonetics correspondingly), psycholinguistics, mathematical linguistics and others. As their titles suggest, they are studied from two points of view and thus require knowledge of both.

Sociophonetics studies the ways in which pronunciation functions in society. It is interested in the ways in which phonetic structures vary in response to different social functions. Society here is used in its broadest sense, it includes such phenomena as nationality, regional and social groups, age, gender, different situations of speaking - talking to equals, superiors, on the “job”, when we are trying to persuade, inform, agree and so on. The aim of sociophonetics is to correlate phonetic variations with situational factors. It’s obvious that these data are vital for language learners who are to observe social norms and to accommodate to different situations they find themselves in.

One more example of interdisciplinary overlap is the relation of linguistics to psychology. Psycholinguistics covers an extremely broad area, from acoustic phonetics to language pathology, and includes such problems as acquisition of language by children, memory, attention, speech perception, second-language acquisition and so on. Phonosemantics studies the relations between the sound structure of a word and its meaning. There is some data proving that the sounds that constitute a word have their own “inner” meaning, which causes certain associations in the listener’s mind. For example, close vowels produce the effect of “smallness”, and voiceless consonants sound more “unpleasant” and “rude” than their voiced counterparts, etc. Some sounds are associated with certain colours. These data may be helpful in teaching, for example, “tying” together the sound structure of a word and its meaning, thus facilitating the process of memorising new words.

Scientists have always been interested how children acquire their own language without being taught. They hope that these data might be useful in teaching grown-up people a foreign language, too.

Pragmalinguistics is a comparatively new science, which studies what linguistic means and ways of influence on a hearer to choose in order to bring about certain effects in the process of communication. Correspondently the domain of pragmaphonetics is to analyse the functioning and speech effects of the sound system of a language.

Phonetics is closely connected with a number of other sciences such as physics (or rather acoustics), mathematics, biology, physiology and others. The more phonetics develops the more various branches of science become involved in the field of phonetic investigation. Phonetics has become important in a number of technological fields connected with communication.

Phoneticians work alongside the communication engineers in devising and perfecting machines that can understand, that is respond to human speech, or machines for reading aloud the printed page and vice versa, converting speech directly into printed words on paper. Although scientists are still dissatisfied with the quality of synthesized speech, these data are applied in security systems, answering machines and for other technical purposes.

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