Текст № 4. Phonetics is concerned with the human noises by which the thought is actualized or given audible shape: the nature of these noises

Phonetics is concerned with the human noises by which the thought is actualized or given audible shape: the nature of these noises, their combinations, and their functions in relation to the meaning.

Practical or normative phonetics studies substance, the material form of phonetic phenomena in relation to meaning. Theoretical phonetics is mainly concerned with the functioning of phonetic units in the language.

Phonetics studies the sound system of the language, that is segmental units (phonemes, allophones), suprasegmental units (word stress, syllabic structure, rhythmic organization, intonation). Phonetics is closely connected with general linguistics but has its own subject matter

Thus phonetics is divided into two major components: segmental phonetics, which is concerned with individual sounds (i.e. "segments" of speech), their behaviour; and suprasegmental phonetics whose domain is the larger units of connected speech: syllables, words, phrases and texts.

All speech sounds have 4 aspects (mechanisms):

- Articulatory – it is the way when the sound-producing mechanism is investigated, that is the way the speech sounds are pronounced

- Acoustic – speech sound is a physical phenomenon. It exists in the form of sound waves which are pronounced by vibrations of the vocal cords. Thus each sound is characterized by frequency, certain duration. All these items represent acoustic aspect.

- Auditory – sound perception aspect. The listener hears the sound, percepts its acoustic features and the hearing mechanism selects from the acoustic information only what is linguistically important.

- Functional – every language unit performs a certain function in actual speech. Functional aspect deals with these functions.

In accord with these 4 aspects of speech sounds 4 branches are distinguished, each of them has its own method of investigation:

- Articulatory phonetics - studies (investigates) sound producing mechanism. Its method consists of observing the way in which the air is set in motion, the movements of the speech organs and the coordination of these movements in the production of single sounds and trains of sounds.

- Acoustic phonetics - studies the way in which the air vibrates between the speaker's mouth and the listener's ear. Has its basic method – instrumental. Speech sounds are investigated by means of operator called spectrograph. Intonation is investigated by intonograph.

- Auditory phonetics- the branch of phonetics investigating the hearing process. Its interests lie more in the sensation of hearing, which is brain activity, than in the physiological working of the ear or the nervous activity between the ear and the brain. The methods applied in auditory phonetics are those of experimental psychology: experimenting, usually based on different types of auditory tests,

- Functional phonetics – is also termed phonology. Studies the way in which sound phenomena function in a particular language, how they are utilized in that language and what part they play in manifesting the meaningful distinctions of the language. So this is the branch of phonetics that studies the linguistic function of consonant and vowel sounds, syllabic structure, word accent and prosodic features, such as pitch, stress and tempo. The basic method is commutation or substitution, substituting sounds in different environments.