Phonetics introduction

Phonology. Development of phonology

Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. It has traditionally focused largely on study of the systems of phonemes in particular languages, but it may also cover any linguistic analysis either at a level beneath the word or at all levels of language where sound is considered to be structured for conveying linguistic meaning.

The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, the Sanskrit grammar composed by Pa?ini in the 4th century BC. In particular the Shiva Sutras, an auxiliary text to the Ashtadhyayi, introduces what can be considered a list of the phonemes of the Sanskrit language, with a notational system for them that is used throughout the main text, which deals with matters of morphology, syntax and semantics.

The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (together with his former student Mikolaj Kruszewski) introduced the concept of the phoneme in 1876, and his work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He introduced in his work functional and social aspect of phonetic phenomena [5].

Phonology grew up due to the pains of linguistics of the Prague Phonological School headed by N. Trubestkoy, R. Trnka, R. Jacobson.

Nikolai Trubetskoy, whose Principles of Phonology, published posthumously in 1939, is among the most important works in the field from this period. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetskoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, although this concept had also been recognized by de Courtenay. He also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. “Trubetskoy declared phonology to be a linguistic science limiting articulatory and acoustics phonetics to anatomy, physiology and acoustics only” [5; 12].

In 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for Generative Phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features. These features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle.

Natural Phonology was a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969 and (more explicitly) in 1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes which interact with one another; which ones are active and which are suppressed are language-specific.

In 1976 John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Government Phonology, which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their selection of certain binary parameters. That is, all languages' phonological structures are essentially the same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations [6].

Soviet linguists consider phonology a branch of phonetics that investigates its most important social aspect.

Differences between phonetics and phonology

It is important to understand differences between phonetics and phonology.

As we mentioned above phonetics and phonology are two branches of linguistics that deal primarily with the structure of human language sounds.

But phonetics focuses on the physical manifestations of speech sounds and on theories of speech production and perception. Most phonetic work falls into the sub-field of articulatory phonetics. From the physical point of view phonetics is strictly about audible sounds and the things that happen in your mouth, throat, nasal and sinus cavities, and lungs to make those sounds.

Phonology is concerned with the systems of rules (or constraints) that determine how the sounds of a language combine and influence one another. Phonology cares about the entire sound system for a given language. The goal is to formulate a model/theory which explains not only the sound patterns found in a particular language, but the patterns found in all languages.

Examples of questions which are interesting to phonologists are: How do sounds change due to the sounds around them? How do sounds combine in a particular language? [8].

So 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 [7].

This is the biggest distinction between phonetics and phonology, although phonologists analyze a lot more than just the obvious differences. They also examine variations on single letter pronunciations, words in which multiple variations can exist versus those in which variations are considered incorrect.

There are also some differences between phonetics and phonology:

· The difference between phonetics and phonology is that phonetics deals with the physical production of these sounds while phonology is the study of sound patterns and their meanings both within and across languages.

· Phonetics is strictly physical while phonology also pays attention to the function or meaning of a sound.

· Phonetics only asks, “Does this sound go here or not?” Phonology asks, “Does the meaning change if I put this sound here instead of that one?”

· Phonetics makes a pretty general description of sounds and can be used to describe sounds in any language. Phonology makes very detailed descriptions of sounds, so each language has its own unique set of symbols (because no two languages use all of the exact same sounds) [9].

We can say that phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics, and phonology to theoretical linguistics.