Language and speech.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 437.

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics which studies speech sounds (phonemes), word-stress and intonation. Phonetics studies the articulation and acoustic qualities of speech sounds, the physical characterist6ics and sound perception of stress and intonation, the lexical and grammatical role of phonemes, word-stress and intonation.

Phonetics and a speech sound. Human speech and its stages.

A speech sound is an element of a speech sequence which is formed with the help of our speech apparatus and can be distinguished from any other sequence. A sound only becomes a speech one if it has a certain set of basic characteristic features that make this sound identifiable and recognizable in a speech flow despite various changes which it can undergo under the influence of its neighbors. E.g. In the word ”brother” – “b-r-o-t-h-e-r” we can identify the sound [b] because it has some characteristic features: bilabial, voiced, plosive.

Unlike any other sound, a speech sound, if not taken separately, can form meaningful combinations like morphemes, roots, endings etc.

A sound of speech has three aspects:

1. physiological (articulatory) aspect. We have a certain mechanism producing speech sounds. It is called organs of speech. The way the organs of speech are working to produce a sound is called its articulation.

2. acoustic aspectconcerns the physical characteristics of the sound of speech. Every sound of speech produces the airwave which may be investigated by means of an instrumental analysis. To that effect many instruments can be applied, such as oscilographs, sound spectrographs, glottographs, etc.

3. functional aspectregards the sounds of speech from the point of view of how the language uses them to convey the ideas, to fulfill its main function, the function of communication.

Phonetics studies the first two aspects of speech sounds. Phonology studies the last.

Language is a system of conventional signals used for communication by a whole community. This pattern of conventions covers the system of sound units (the phonemes), the inflections and arrangement of words, and the association of meaning with words. The main function of language is communication. When we communicate we use this system in our speech, i.e. speech is the realization of this system in the act of communication.

When we communicate we deal with two kinds of reality:

1. the concrete, measurable reality of the sounds uttered;
2. the abstract reality made up in our minds.

In the first, concrete approach, we deal with the sounds which we can hear, record, pronounce, i.e. we deal with sounds in relation to speech.In the second, abstract approach, we deal with the behavior of sounds in a particular language.Measurable reality can be pronounced, abstract – cannot. An utterance, an act of speech is a single concrete means of conveying “meanings”, of exchanging thoughts and thus organizing the life of human community. But no meaning can be conveyed without a certain kind of “form”. These forms are apprehended by us because they are signaled to us by means of sound or graphic “envelopes”, which are the units of the expressive plane. Phonology and phonetics study the sound envelopes, the sound forms of the meaning. Phonology is concerned with the ultimate units of the expression plane of language, and in this sense analysis the lowest layer of the structure of language.

Human speech is the result of a highly complicated series of events. The formation of the concept takes place at a linguistic level, that is in the brain of the speaker, this stage may be called psychological. The massage formed within the brain is transmitted along the nervous system to the speech organs. Therefore we may say that the human brain controls the behavior of the articulation organs which effects producing a particular pattern of speech sounds. This second stage may be called physiological. The moments of the speech apparatus disturb the air stream thus producing sound waves. Consequently the third stage may be called physical or acoustic. Further, any communication requires a listener, as well as a speaker. So the last stages are the reception of the sound waves by the listener's hearing physiological apparatus, the transmissionof the spoken message through the nervous system to the brain and the linguistic interpretationof the information conveyed.