Lecture 5: Phonetics and Phonology as different branches of Linguistics

Types of Phonetics

General phonetics	It studies universal positions of sound articulation (for instance, identification of sounds according to the position the differences of labial, tongue and throat consonants, according to the ways of articulation of plosive, fricative and plosive-fricative features).
Specific phonetics	It investigates above mentioned issues in the samples of certain languages. Specific phonetics deals with the speech sounds in the shapes of historical and modern, synchronic and diachronic, descriptive and experimental sides.
Comparative phonetics	It investigates vowel and consonant phonemes, their phonetic changes and others in the comparative aspect of several genetically related and non-related languages.

Types of phonetics according to its object of study

1. Descriptive phonetics which studies the phonetic system of a certain language.
2. Historical (diachronical) phonetics which studies the sound undergoes in the development of a language.

Segments and suprasegmentals

Phoneticians divide a speech stream into two categories: segments and suprasegmentals.

Segments are discrete units of speech sound and are further divided into consonant and vowel categories. Segments are transcribed easily using discrete symbols.

Suprasegmentals, on the other hand, often apply to entire strings of consonants and vowels, which correspond to properties such as tone, stress, and intonation. Suprasegmentals are difficult to transcribe using an alphabetic-like transcription system.

Articulatory phonetics

The production of speech involves 3 processes:

• Initiation: Setting air in motion through the vocal tract.
• Phonation: The modification of airflow as it passes through the larynx (related to voicing).
• Articulation: The shaping of airflow to generate particular sound types (related to manner)