2. The branches of Phonetics.

Phonetics provides a description of

how sounds are produced by the speech organs (articulatory phonetics);

how they are perceived by hearers (auditory phonetics);

how they are transmitted from the speaker to the hearer (acoustic phonetics);

how they function in the language (functional phonetics).

The branch of phonetics that studies the way in which the air is set in the mouth, the movements of the speech organs and the coordination of these movements in the production of single sounds and trains of sounds is called articulatory phonetics.

Acoustic phonetics studies the way in which the air vibrates between the speaker’s mouth and the listener’s ear.

The branch of phonetics investigating the hearing process is known as auditory phonetics. Its interests lie more in the sensation of hearing, which is brain activity, than the physiological working of the ear or the nervous activity between the ear and the brain. The means by which we discriminate sounds – quality, sensations of pitch, loudness, length, are relevant here. This branch of phonetics is of great interest to anyone who teaches or studies pronunciation.

Functional phonetics - 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. In linguistics, function is usually understood to mean discriminatory function, that is, the role of the various elements of the language in the distinguishing of one sequence of sounds, such as a word or a sequence of words, from another of different meaning. The basic method is commutation or substitution (замены), substituting sounds in different environments.

Besides the four mentioned above branches there are other divisions of Phonetics. We may speak of general phonetics and the phonetics of a particular language (special or descriptive phonetics). General phonetics studies all the sound-producing possibilities of the human speech apparatus and the ways they are used for purpose of communication. Descriptive phonetics studies the contemporary phonetic system of the particular language, i.e. the system of its pronunciation, and gives a description of all the phonetic units of the language. Descriptive phonetics is based on general phonetics.

Linguists also distinguish historical phonetics whose aim is to trace and establish the successive changes in the phonetic system of a given language at different stages of its historical development.

Comparative phonetics whose aims are to study the correlation between the phonetic systems of two or more languages, especially kindred ones, and find out the correspondence between the speech sounds of kindred languages.

Phonetics can also be represented by interdisciplinary branches:

1 Phonostylistics which studies the stylistic aspects of sounds (Соколова)

2 There existed a number of phonetics branches which represent the combination of dates, derived from different sciences. For instance, phonetics and psychology which results in psychophonetics as a part of psycholinguists.

3 Social phonetics as a part of social linguistics in which two disciplines mixed: phonetics and sociology.

Phonetics can also be theoretical and practical.

1.Practical, or normative, phonetics that studies the substance, the material form of phonetic phenomena in relation to meaning.

2.Theoretical phonetics, which is mainly concerned with the functioning of phonetic units in language.

Phonetics is itself divided into two major parts: segmental phonetics, which is concerned with segmental units (phonemes, allophones) and suprasegmental phonetics (word stress, syllabic structure, rhythmic organization, intonation, sentences, phrases, textes)

All the branches of phonetics are closely connected not only with one another but also with other branches of linguistics. Phonetics is also connected with many other sciences. Acoustic phonetics is connected with physics and mathematics. Articulatory phonetics is connected with physiology, anatomy, and anthropology. Historical phonetics is connected with general history of the people whose language is studied; it is also connected with archaeology.