PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

 Syntax is about sentence formation, and semantics about sentence interpretation, phonetics and phonology cover the field of sentence utterance. Phonetics is concerned with how sounds are produced, transmitted and perceived (we will only look at the production of sounds). Phonology is concerned with how sounds function in relation to each other in a language. In other words, phonetics is about sounds of language, phonology about sound systems of language. Phonetics is a descriptive tool necessary to the study of the phonological aspects of a language.

Phonetics and phonology are worth studying for several reasons. One is that as all study of language, the study of phonology gives us insight into how the human mind works.

Two more reasons are that the study of the phonetics of a foreign language gives us a much better ability both to hear and to correct mistakes that we make, and also to teach pronunciation of the foreign language (in this case English) to others.

As phonetics and phonology both deal with sounds, and as English spelling and English pronunciation are two very different things, it is important that you keep in mind that we are not interested in letters here, but in sounds. For instance, English has not 5 or 6 but 20 different vowels, even if these vowels are all written by different combinations of 6 different letters, "a, e, i, o, u, y". The orthographic spelling of a word will be given in italics, e.g. please, and the phonetic transcription between square brackets [pli:z]. Thus the word please consists of three consonants, [p,l,z], and one vowel, [i:]. And sounds considered from the phonological point of view are put between slashes.