11. Фонетика как наука. Предмет и задачи теоретической фонетики.

Phonetics - is a branch of Linguistics that studies:

1) sounds in the broad sense, comprising segmental sounds (vowels and consonants) and prosodic units;

2) ways in which sounds are organized into a system of units;

3) variation of the units in all types and styles of a spoken language;

4) acoustic properties of sounds;

5) physiological basis of sound production (taking into account individual peculiarities of a speaker).

The Phonetic System of a Language - a set of phonetic units arranged in an orderly way to replace each other in a given framework. 2 levels:

1. THE SEGMENTAL LEVEL:

a specially organized level of the phonetic system with a certain number of its units: sounds of speech (vowels and consonants) which form the vocalic and consonantal subsystems. Phonetic units are meaningless (no lex. or gram. meaning), but serve to form other lang. units and differentiate their lex. and gram. meaning.

2. THE PROSODIC (SUPRASEGMENTAL ) LEVEL:

a specially organized level of the phonetic system with a certain number of its units: syllables, rhythmic groups, intonation groups, utterances which form the subsystems of pitch, rhythm, stress, tempo, pauses.

Human speech is the result of the following highly complicated series of events:

Process of oral speech production

Speaker's brain	Speaker's  vocal tract	Transmission of sounds through air	Listener's ear	Listener's brain
1 linguistic	2 articulatory	3 acoustic	4 auditory	5 linguistic

Aspects of sound phenomena

• the articulatory aspect(comprises all the movements and positions of the speech organs necessary to pronounce a speech sound; studies respiration, phonation, articulation )

According to the main sound-producing functions, the speech organs can be divided into the following four groups:

(1) the power mechanism (regulates the force of the air stream);

(2) the vibration mechanism (vibrator function when producing voice);

(3) the resonator mechanism (principal resonators);

(4) the obstruction mechanism (forms obstructions).

• the acoustic aspect (presupposes that sounds exist in the form of sound waves and have the following physical properties:

• intensity (depends on the amplitude of vibrations);

• frequency (the number of vibrations of the vocal cords per second);

• duration (the time of vibrations)

- spectrum (the range of frequencies)

• the auditory (perceptive) aspect(analyses speech sounds from the point of view of perception)

• the linguistic (functional) aspect(segmental sounds and prosodic units are linguistic phenomena because they constitute meaningful units and perform

main linguistic functions:

• Constitutive function: phonetic units constitute units of the upper levels of a language: morphemes, words, word-forms, utterances;

• Distinctive function: phonetic units when opposed to each other differentiate lexical and grammatical meanings of other language units (e.g. ask – asks, man-men, eat-each, a name-an aim);

• Identificatory (recognitive) function: the sound phenomena enable the listener to identify them as concrete words, word-forms or utterances.

Branches of Phonetics

• Articulatory Phonetics (studies the way in which the speech organs are used to produce single sounds and their combinations);

• Acoustic Phonetics (the study of the physical properties of speech sounds);

• Auditory Phonetics (studies the way people perceive speech sounds);

• Functional Phonetics (Phonology) (studies the linguistic aspect of speech sounds).

PHONOLOGY

PH. was founded in Prague by a group of linguists (N. Trubetskoy, R. Jacobson and oth.).

PH. discovers distinctive features of sound matter that have a differential value in a language.

PH. establishes the system of phonemes and prosodemes.

PH. studies the laws of distribution and grouping phonemes in syllables and words.

Relations between Phonetics and Phonology

N. Trubetskoy: “Phonetics (1) and Phonology (2) are independent sciences”. (1) is biological and concerned with different characteristics of speech sounds; (2) is linguistic and concerned with the social function of phonetic phenomena.

The majority of Soviet phoneticians: “it is not logical to separate function from form”.

TODAY: the idea of unity of (1) and (2); the description of the ways phonological language units function in real speech.

Additional Branches of Phonetics

-General Phonetics

-Special (Descriptive) Phonetics

-Comparative Phonetics

-Practical Phonetics

-Theoretical Phonetics

-Historical Phonetics

-Contemporary Phonetics

Links with Other Branches of Linguistics

• Grammar (through orphography and intonation (e.g. man-men, foot-feet, sing-sang, wife-wives; distinction of different types of sentences: He came home (F). He came home (R) );

• Lexicology (through pronunciation and word-stress (e.g. homographs: wind [i] – to wind [ai], ‘object – to ob’ject);

• History of a Language (e.g. hasty-nasty);

• Stylistics (through intonation + graphical expressive means e.g. repetition of words, capitalization or italics: THINK before you cross the road).

Links with Non-Linguistic Sciences

• Physiology

• Biology

• Physics

• Psychology

• History

• Statistics

• !!!Computer sciences (automatic speech recognition, creation of synthetic speech, perception of speech by computer)

Methods of Phonetic Analysis

Subjective (introspective) – the oldest and the simplest – direct observation and sensory analysis.

Objective (instrumental) (2nd half of the 20th cent.) – the use of various instrumental techniques (palatography, laryngoscopy, X-ray photography, etc.)

CONSOSNANT – is a speech sound produced by a partial or complete obstruction of the air stream by a constriction of the speech organs. (24 consonant sounds in English)

Consonants are usually classified according to the following principles:

⇒ According to the type of obstruction and the manner of the production of noise: occlusive and constrictive. Occlusive consonants are produced with a complete obstruction formed by the articulating organs, the air-passage in the mouth cavity is blocked. Occlusive consonants may be: (A) noise consonants and (B) sonorants.

According to the manner of the production of noise occlusive noise consonants are divided into plosive consonants (or stops) and affricates.

Constrictive consonants may be: (A) noise consonants (or fricatives) and (B) sonorants.

⇒ According to the active speech organ and the place of obstruction: labial, lingual and glottal.

⇒ According to the work of the vocal cords and the force of articulation: voiced and voiceless, fortis, lenis.

⇒ According to the position of the soft palate: oral and nasal.

The distinction between vowels and consonants is based upon their articulatory and acoustic characteristics. Unlike consonants vowels are produced with no obstruction to the stream of the air and on the perception level their integral characteristics is a musical sound or tone formed by means of periodic vibrations of the vocal cords in the larynx. In producing vowels the muscular tension is equally spread over all speech organs. (20 vowel sounds: 12 vowels+8 diphthongs)

CLASSIFICATION:

• the stability of articulation: monophthongs, diphthongs

• the position of a tongue: front, mixed (central), back

• the vertical movements of a tongue: high or close, mid or half-open, low or open

• the position of the lips: rounded or labialized and unrounded or non-labialized

• length or quantity or duration

• tenseness