Sphere of Application of Phonetics

Phonetics has a wide sphere of application. It is used in teaching children to read and write their mother tongue. It would be very difficult to do that without a thorough understanding of the relations between sounds and letters. The knowledge of phonetics is indispensable in teaching and learning foreign languages. The modern method of teaching foreign languages based on phonetics was first introduced by Prof. L. V. Scerba in the twenties of the XXth.

Phonetics is also used in teaching deaf-mutes to speak, and in correcting speech defects.

The creation of new orthographies for hitherto unwritten languages and the improvement of already existing orthographies also presupposes careful phonetic investigation. Phonetics is also used (or should be used) in telephony, in broadcasting, in training actors, teachers, singers, etc.

1.4. Aspects of Speech Sounds. Units of Phonetics

Speech sounds are of a complex nature and have four different aspects (or mechanisms):

(a) the articulatory aspect;

(b) the acoustic aspect;

(c) the auditory (perceptive) aspect;

(d) the functional (linguistic) aspect.

Now it is possible to show the correlation between the stages of the speech chain and the aspects of the sound matter.

The articulatory aspect – it is the way when the sound-producing mechanism is investigated, that is the way the speech sounds are pronounced. That part of phonetics which is concerned with the work of the speech organs and their ability to form definite speech sounds was termed anthropophonics by I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay.

The acoustic aspect studies sound waves. Being acoustic phenomena, sounds share their properties with other acoustic phenomena. Thus, like any other sounds, speech sounds are communicated to the air in the form of sound waves. Speech sounds have pitch, intensity, timbre; likewise musical tones and noises may be distinguished among them. Speech sounds can be investigated by the same methods as any other sounds and are subject to the same acoustic laws.

The auditory (sound-perception) aspect, on the one hand, is a physiological mechanism. We can perceive sound waves within a range of 16 Hz-20.000 Hz with a difference in 3 Hz. The human ear transforms mechanical vibrations of the air into nervous and transmits them to brain. The listener hears the acoustic features of the fundamental frequency, formant frequency, intensity and duration in terms of perceptible categories of pitch, quality, loudness and length. On the other hand, it is also a psychological mechanism. The point is that repetitions of what might be heard as the same utterance are only coincidentally, if ever, acoustically identical. Phonetic identity is a. theoretical ideal. Phonetic similarity, not phonetic identity, is the criterion with which we operate in the linguistic analysis.

The functional (linguistic) aspect. Phonemes, syllables, stress, and intonation are linguistic phenomena. They constitute meaningful units (morphemes, words, word-forms, utterances). Sounds of speech perform different linguistic functions.

The phonetic system of language is a set of phonetic units arranged in an orderly way to replace each other in a given framework. Phonetics is divided into two major components (or systems): segmental phonetics, which is concerned with individual sounds (i.e. "segments" of speech) and suprasegmental phonetics dealing with the larger units of connected speech: syllables, words, phrases and texts.

1. Segmental units are sounds of speech (vowels and consonants) which form the vocalic and consonantal systems.

2. Suprasegmental, or prosodic, units are syllables, accentual (rhythmic) units, intonation groups, utterances, which form the subsystem of pitch, stress, rhythm, tempo, pauses.

Now we may define phonetics as a branch of linguistics that studies speech sounds in the broad sense, comprising segmental sounds, suprasegmental units and prosodic phenomena (pith, stress, tempo, rhythm, pauses).

Let us consider the four components of the phonetic system of language.

The first and the basic component of the phonetic structure of language is the system of its segmental phonemes existing in the material form of their allophones. The phonemic component has 3 aspects, or manifestations:

1) the system of its phonemes as discrete isolated units;

2) the distribution of the allophones of the phonemes;

3) the methods of joining speech sounds together in words and at their junction, or the methods of effecting VC, CV, CC, and VV transitions.

The second component is the syllabic structure of words. The syllabic structure has two aspects, which are inseparable from each other: syllable formation and syllable division.

The third component is the accentual structure of words as items of vocabulary (i.e. as pronounced in isolation). The accentual structure of words has three aspects: the physical (acoustic) nature of word accent; the position of the accent in disyllabic and polysyllabic words; the degrees of word accent.

The fourth component of the phonetic system is the intonational structure of utterances.

The four components of the phonetic system of language (phonemic, syllabic, accentual and intonational) all constitute its pronunciation (in the broad sense of the term).