Phonetics and its branches.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 757.

The science of phonetics is concerned only with such sounds of speech which are produced by the human speaking apparatus, they have a set of basic characteristics and are capable of carrying meaningful linguistic information.

Speech sounds can be considered and investigated as a physical phenomenon having its acoustic aspect. The branch of phonetics which studies the way in which the air stream vibrates between the speaker's mouth and the listener's ear is called acoustic phonetics.

The branch of phonetics investigating the hearing process is known as auditory phonetics.

The branch which studies speech sounds as units serving the purposes of communication is called phonology.

Besides there are other divisions of phonetics.

General phoneticsdeals with analysis, description and comparison of phonetic phenomena in different languages.

Descriptive phoneticsstudies the contemporary phonetic system of a language, i.e. the system of pronunciation, and gives a description of all the phonetic units of this language.

Historical phoneticsis the branch of phonetics, which studies phonetic components on the diachronic level; it is a part of the history of a language, which studies the history of the development of the phonetic laws.

Comparative phonetics,which is closely connected with historical phonetics, deals with correlation between the phonetic system of two or more languages.

Phonology –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..

Dialectology – the branch of phonetics which studies the dialectal differences in pronunciation.

Phonotacticsstudies patterns of combinability of speech sounds and frequency of their occurrence. The knowledge of phonotactics possibilities also shows us how this system works, where we have opportunities or taboos. This can be important if you want to lessen or minimize your foreign accent. E.g.: the sounds [t, n] are the most frequently used consonants in English as well as the consonant clusters: mbl, ndl. Consequently, a teacher should introduce these sounds first.

Phonostylisticsis the study of phonetic phenomena from the stylistic point of view. It deals with the main phonetic peculiarities of existing intonation styles, which are displayed in a variety of texts generated in everyday communication of a modern man.