Phonetics and its Connection with Social Sciences

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1117.

Our further point should be made in connection with the relationship between phonetics and social sciences.

Sociophoneticsstudies the ways in which pronunciation interacts with society. It is the study of the way in which phonetic structures change in response to different social functions and the deviations of what these functions are. Society here is used in its broadest sense, to cover a spectrum of phenomena to do with nationality, more restricted regional and social groups, and the specific interactions of individuals within them. Here there are innumerable facts to be discovered, even about a language as well investigated as English, concerning, for instance, the nature, of the different kinds of English pronunciation we use in different situations – when we are talking to equals, superiors or subordinates; when we are “on the job”, when we are old or young; male or female; when we are trying to persuade, inform, agree or disagree and so on. We may hope that very soon sociophonetics may supply elementary information about: “who can say, what, how, using what phonetic means, to whom, when, and why?” In teaching phonetics we would consider the study of sociolinguistics to be an essential part of the explanation in the functional area of phonetic units.

Psycholinguisticsas a distinct area of interest developed in the early sixties, and in its early form covered the psychological implications of an extremely broad area, from acoustic phonetics to language pathology. Nowadays no one would want to deny the existence of strong mutual bonds of interest operating between linguistics, phonetics in our case and psychology. The acquisition of language by children, the extent to which language mediates or structures thinking; the extent to which language is influenced and itself influences such things as memory, attention, recall and 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 are broad illustrations of such bounds.

The field of phonetics is thus becoming wider and tending to extend over the limits originally set by its purely linguistic applications. On the other hand, the growing interest in phonetics is doubtless partly due to increasing recognition of the central position of language in every line of social activity. It is important, however, that the phonetician should remain a linguist and look upon his science as a study of the spoken form of language. It is its application to linguistic phenomena that makes phonetics a social science in the proper sense of the word, notwithstanding its increasing need of technical methods, and in spite of its practical applications.