Phonetics and phonology

Phonetics deals with speech sounds. In Greek «Phoneticos» means pertaining to voice and sounds. The significance of Phonetics is evident since speech is the most important means of human intercourse.

Closely associated with Phonetics is another branch of Linguistics known as Phonology.

Separate segments of speech have no meaning of their own, they mean smth only in combinations which are called “words”. So Phonetics studies sounds as articulatory and acoustic units, and Phonology investigates sounds as units, which serve communicative purposes. Phonetics and Phonology are closely connected. The unit of Phonetics is a speech sound, the unit of Phonology is a phoneme.

Phonemes can be discovered by a method of minimal pairs. This method consists in finding pairs of words, which differ in one phoneme. Ex, if we replace /c/ by /b/ in word “cat”, we reproduce a new word “bat”, so this is a pair of words distinguished in meaning by a single sound change. Two words of this kind are termed a “minimal pair”.

It’s possible to take this process further, we can also reproduce “can-ran-man” – it’s a “minimal set”. The change of the vowel /96/ in ban-bun-bone-burn-born.

To establish the phonemes of the language the phonologists try to find pairs that show which sounds occur or do not occur in identical positions – commutation test.

The phonemes of a language form the system of oppositions, in which any phomene is usually opposed to any other phoneme in at least one position, one lexical or grammatical minimal pair. If the substitution one sound for another results in the change of meaning, the commuted sounds are dif. phonemes, speech sounds which are phonologically significant.

So Phonology is the link between Phonetics and the rest of Linguistics. Only by studying both the phonetics and the phonology of English is it possible to acquire a full understanding of the use of sounds in English speech.