III. Connection of phonetics with other sciences.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 582.

Language is not an isolated phenomenon; it is part of our society, and a part of us. It is a prerequisite of our society. For the last twenty years we have observed the development of quite distinct interdisciplinary subjects, such as sociolinguistics (and sociophonetics correspondingly), psycholinguistics, mathematical linguistics and others.

Sociolinguistics studies the ways in which pronunciation interacts with society, in other words, the way in which phonetic structures change in response to different social functions and the deviations of what these functions are. Society is considered here in its broadest sense – nationality, more restricted regional and social groups, and the specific interactions of individuals within them.

Psycholinguistics (developed as a distinct area in the sixties) It deals with such

aspects, as the acquisition of language by children; the extent to which language meditates or structures thinking; the extent to which language is influenced and influences itself such things as memory, attention, recall, constraints on perception; and the extent to which language has a certain role to play in the understanding of human development; the problems of speech production etc.

Topics for discussions:

1. What does Phonetics study? What are the main levels of its concern? What is

Phonology?

2. What are the main branches of Phonetics? What are their peculiarities? Give your own examples of consonant clusters that exist in Russian/Ukrainian but do not in English.

3. How is Phonetics connected with other sciences?