Phonetics and Phonology

 Introduction to Linguistics

By K. Jahan

 

Linguistics is the study of human language in its most fundamental form. It investigates the origins and purposes of human language, as well as what it is and how it functions.

Human language is made up of a variety of different sorts and sizes of building pieces.

 

Consider the following scenario:

 

1. Words and diverse types of words are formed by combining speech sounds.

 

Consider the word man,' which is made up of three sounds: 'm,' 'n,' and 'n'. 'a' and 'n' are two letters. Furthermore, if you examine another version of the word – plural form – you will discover that 'men' is a collection of the other three sounds 'm', 'e', and 'n' (it is called 'men').

 

2. In the same way, words are organized in a certain order to form phrases and sentences.

 

for example: 'Man is mortal,'

 

3. We also modify the beginnings and finishes of words on occasion (compare).

'remain' with 'stayed') to change their meaning depending on the situation (it is morphology).

 

4. The sequence of words (semantics) and the context can have an impact on meanings.

The speaker's and listener's knowledge (pragmatics).

 

As a result, linguistics encompasses all of these subjects and their subfields. As shown in the table above, we need to study human speech sounds, i.e., phonetics and phonology, as one of the core branches of linguistics dealing with the structure of speech sounds in general (phonetics) and, in certain cases, in a specific language (phonology).

 

The study of the structure and description of speech sounds such as consonants and vowels is known as phonetics and phonology. Furthermore, to investigate the sets of phonemes and their varied forms and patterns (for example, dynamic; as in linked speech, and static; as in isolation) within a human language.

 

Expertise in phonetics and phonology, among other things, allows researchers to characterize undocumented spoken languages, which is extremely useful for language documentation and description. In terms of sound systems (languages) and their classifications, it is also an important topic for typological investigations, cross-linguistic comparisons, and generalizations.

Difference Between Phonetics and Phonology

It's essential to differentiate between phonetics and phonology right away. Both are key subfields of linguistics that deal with human speech sounds that overlap.

The main distinction between the two is that phonetics is concerned with the study of universal human speech sounds, whereas phonology is concerned with the study of how sounds are structured in specific languages (such as English, Urdu or Arabic).

 

Phonology is the study of speech patterns (e.g., phonological laws within a certain language) and possibilities, which focuses on the structuring of sounds. The terms 'distribution' and 'patterning' in relation to speech are used to describe phonology.

 

Phonologists may investigate why the plurals of cat, dog, and watch are 'cats' (ending with the 's' sound), 'dogs' (finishing with the 'z' sound), and watches are watches (ending with the 'iz' sound). This example of plural 's' also demonstrates how phonology and morphology interact, and morpho-phonemics is the study of this contact between phonology and morphology.

 

The study of the actual process of speech sound creation is known as phonetics. The term 'phonetics' comes from the Greek words 'phone', which means sound or voice, and 'etics,' which means study. It is concerned with the creation, transmission, and reception of speech. Different fields of phonetics, such as acoustic phonetics, auditory phonetics, and articulatory phonetics, study how people make speech sounds.

 

Phonology, as previously mentioned, is the study of a language's sounds (e.g., English). In phonology, it's important to know if sounds are contrastive, or whether swapping one sound for another result
in a distinct, or 'contrastive' meaning. For example, in English, /r/ and /l/ are two distinct sounds, and the words 'road' and 'load' have separate meanings, hence these two phonemes are distinct. In other words, phonology determines a language's sound system.