Phonetics (from the Greek: φωνή, phōnē, "sound, voice") is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign.[1] It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs (phones): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status. Phonology, on the other hand, is concerned with the abstract, grammatical characterization of systems of sounds or signs.
The field of phonetics is a multiple layered subject of linguistics that focuses on speech. In the case of oral languages there are three basic areas of study:
- Articulatory phonetics: the study of the production of speech sounds by the articulatory and vocal tract by the speaker
- Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical transmission of speech sounds from the speaker to the listener
- Auditory phonetics: the study of the reception and perception of speech sounds by the listener
History
Phonetics was studied as early as 500 BC in ancient India, with Pāṇini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BC treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification. The Ancient Greeks are credited as the first to base a writing system on a phonetic alphabet. Modern phonetics began with Alexander Melville Bell, whose Visible Speech (1867) introduced a system of precise notation for writing down speech sounds.[2]
Phonetic transcription
The International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA)
is used as the basis for the phonetic transcription of speech. It is
based on the Latin alphabet and is able to transcribe most features of
speech such as consonants, vowels, and suprasegmental features. Every
documented phoneme available within the known languages in the world is
assigned its own corresponding symbol.
The difference between phonetics and phonology
Phonology concerns itself with systems of phonem, abstract cognitive
units of speech sound or sign which distinguish the words of a
language. Phonetics, on the other hand, concerns itself with the
production, transmission, and perception of the physical phenomena which are abstracted in the mind to constitute these speech sounds or signs.
Using an Edison phonograph, Ludimar Hermann investigated the spectral properties of vowels and consonants. It was in these papers that the term formant
was first introduced. Hermann also played back vowel recordings made
with the Edison phonograph at different speeds in order to test Willis' and Wheatstone's theories of vowel production.
Relation to phonology
In contrast to phonetics, phonology
is the study of how sounds and gestures pattern in and across
languages, relating such concerns with other levels and aspects of
language. Phonetics deals with the articulatory and acoustic properties
of speech sounds, how they are produced, and how they are perceived. As
part of this investigation, phoneticians may concern themselves with the
physical properties of meaningful sound contrasts or the social meaning
encoded in the speech signal (e.g. gender, sexuality, ethnicity,
etc.). However, a substantial portion of research in phonetics is not
concerned with the meaningful elements in the speech signal.
While it is widely agreed that phonology is grounded in phonetics,
phonology is a distinct branch of linguistics, concerned with sounds and
gestures as abstract units (e.g., features, phonemes, mora, syllables, etc.) and their conditioned variation (via, e.g., allophonic rules, constraints, or derivational rules).[3] Phonology relates to phonetics via the set of distinctive features,
which map the abstract representations of speech units to articulatory
gestures, acoustic signals, and/or perceptual representations.[4][5][6]
Subfields
Phonetics as a research discipline has three main branches:
- articulatory phonetics is concerned with the articulation of speech: The position, shape, and movement of articulators or speech organs, such as the lips, tongue, and vocal folds.
- acoustic phonetics is concerned with acoustics of speech: The spectro-temporal properties of the sound waves produced by speech, such as their frequency, amplitude, and harmonic structure.
- auditory phonetics is concerned with speech perception: the perception, categorization, and recognition of speech sounds and the role of the auditory system and the brain in the same.
Types of notational systems
Most phonetic transcription is based on the assumption that
linguistic sounds are segmentable into discrete units that can be
represented by symbols.
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Alphabetic
IPA
The International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA) is one of the most popular and well-known phonetic alphabets. It
was originally created by primarily British language teachers, with
later efforts from European phoneticians and linguists. It has changed
from its earlier intention as a tool of foreign language pedagogy to a
practical alphabet of linguists. It is currently becoming the most often
seen alphabet in the field of phonetics.
Most American dictionaries for native English-speakers—American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Webster's Third New International Dictionary—employ respelling systems based on the English alphabet, with diacritical marks over the vowels and stress marks.[1] (See Wikipedia:United States dictionary transcription for a generic version.)
Another commonly encountered alphabetic tradition was originally created for the transcription of Native American and European languages, and is still commonly used by linguists of Slavic, Indic, Uralic, Semitic, and Caucasian languages. This is sometimes labeled the Americanist
phonetic alphabet, but this is misleading because it has always been
widely used for languages outside the Americas. The difference between
these alphabets and IPA is small, although often the specially created
characters of the IPA are often abandoned in favour of already existing
characters with diacritics (e.g. many characters are borrowed from
Eastern European orthographies) or digraphs.
There are also extended versions of the IPA, for example: extIPA, VoQs, and Luciano Canepari's canIPA.
Aspects of alphabetic transcription
Other alphabets, such as Hangul, may have their own phonetic extensions. There also exist featural phonetic transcription systems, such as Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech and its derivatives.
The International Phonetic Association recommends that a phonetic transcription should be enclosed in square brackets "[ ]". A transcription that specifically denotes only phonological contrasts may be enclosed in slashes
"/ /" instead. If one is in doubt, it is best to use brackets, for by
setting off a transcription with slashes one makes a theoretical claim
that every symbol within is phonemically contrastive for the language being transcribed.
Phonetic transcriptions try to objectively capture the actual
pronunciation of a word, whereas phonemic transcriptions are
model-dependent. For example, in The Sound Pattern of English, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle transcribed the English word night
phonemically as /nixt/. In this model, the phoneme /x/ is never
realized as [x], but shows its presence by "lengthening" the preceding
vowel. The preceding vowel in this case is the phoneme /i/, which is
pronounced [aɪ] when "long". So phonemic /nixt/ is equivalent to
phonetic [naɪt], but underlying this analysis is the belief that
historical sounds such as the gh in night may remain in a
word long after they have ceased to be pronounced, or that a phoneme may
exist in a language without ever being directly expressed. (This was
later rejected by both Chomsky and Halle.)
For phonetic transcriptions, there is flexibility in how closely
sounds may be transcribed. A transcription that gives only a basic idea
of the sounds of a language in the broadest terms is called a broad transcription;
in some cases this may be equivalent to a phonemic transcription (only
without any theoretical claims). A close transcription, indicating
precise details of the sounds, is called a narrow transcription. These are not binary choices, but the ends of a continuum, with many possibilities in between. All are enclosed in brackets.
For example, in some dialects the English word pretzel in a
narrow transcription would be [ˈpʰɹ̥ʷɛʔt.sɫ̩], which notes several
phonetic features that may not be evident even to a native speaker. An
example of a broad transcription is [ˈpʰɹɛt.sɫ̩], which only indicates
some of the easier to hear features. A yet broader transcription would
be [ˈpɹɛt.sl]. Here every symbol represents an unambiguous speech sound,
but without going into any unnecessary detail. None of these
transcriptions make any claims about the phonemic status of the sounds.
Instead, they represent certain ways in which it is possible to produce
the sounds that make up the word.
There are also several possibilities in how to transcribe this word
phonemically, but here the differences are generally not of precision,
but of analysis. For example, pretzel could be /ˈprɛt.sl̩/ or /ˈpret.səl/. The special symbol for English r is not used, for it is not meaningful to distinguish it from a rolled r. The differences in the letter e reflect claims as to what the essential difference is between the vowels of pretzel and pray;
there are half a dozen ideas in the literature as to what this may be.
The second transcription claims that there are two vowels in the word,
even if they can't both be heard, while the first claims there is only
one.
However, phonemic transcriptions may also be broad or narrow, or
perhaps it would be better to say abstract vs. concrete. They may show a
fair amount of phonetic detail, usually of a phoneme's most common
allophone, but because they are abstract symbols they do not need to
resemble any sound at all directly. Phonemic symbols will frequently be
chosen to avoid diacritics as much as possible, under a 'one sound one
symbol' policy, or may even be restricted to the ASCII symbols of a typical keyboard. For example, the English word church
may be transcribed as /t͡ʃɝːt͡ʃ/, a close approximation of its actual
pronunciation, or more abstractly as /crc/, which is easier to type.
Phonemic symbols should always be explained, especially when they are as
divergent from actual /crc/.
Occasionally a transcription will be enclosed in pipes ("| |"). This goes beyond phonology into morphological analysis. For example, the words pets and beds
could be transcribed phonetically as [pʰɛʔts] and [b̥ɛdz] (in a fairly
narrow transcription), and phonemically as /pets/ and /bedz/. Because
/s/ and /z/ are separate phonemes
in English, they receive separate symbols in the phonemic analysis.
However, you probably recognize that underneath this, they represent the
same plural ending. This can be indicated with the pipe notation. If
you believe the plural ending is essentially an s, as English
spelling would suggest, the words can be transcribed |pets| and |beds|.
If, as most linguists would probably suggest, it is essentially a z, these would be |petz| and |bedz|.
To avoid confusion with IPA symbols, it may be desirable to specify
when native orthography is being used, so that, for example, the English
word jet is not read as "yet". This is done with angle brackets or chevrons:
⟨jet⟩. It is also common to italicize such words, but the chevrons
indicate specifically that they are in the original language's
orthography, and not in English transliteration.
Iconic
Visible Speech
In iconic phonetic notation, the shapes of the phonetic
characters are designed so that they visually represent the position of
articulators in the vocal tract. This is unlike alphabetic notation,
where the correspondence between character shape and articulator
position is arbitrary. This notation is potentially more flexible than
alphabetic notation in showing more shades of pronunciation (MacMahon
1996:838–841). An example of iconic phonetic notation is the Visible Speech system, created by Scottish phonetician, Alexander Melville Bell (Ellis 1869:15).
Analphabetic
Another type of phonetic notation that is more precise than alphabetic notation is analphabetic
phonetic notation. Instead of both the alphabetic and iconic notational
types' general principle of using one symbol per sound, analphabetic
notation uses long sequences of symbols to precisely describe the
component features of an articulatory gesture (MacMahon 1996:842–844).
This type of notation is reminiscent of the notation used in chemical formulas
to denote the composition of chemical compounds. Although more
descriptive than alphabetic notation, analphabetic notation is less
practical for many purposes (e.g. for descriptive linguists doing
fieldwork or for speech pathologists impressionistically transcribing
speech disorders). As a result, this type of notation is uncommon.
Two examples of this type were developed by the Danish Otto Jespersen (1889) and American Kenneth Pike
(1943). Pike's system, which is part of a larger goal of scientific
description of phonetics, is particularly interesting in its challenge
against the descriptional method of the phoneticians who created
alphabetic systems like the IPA. An example of Pike's system can be
demonstrated by the following. A syllabic voiced alveolar nasal consonant (/n̩/ in IPA) is notated as
- MaIlDeCVoeIpvnnAPpaatdtltnransnsfSpvavdtlvtnransssfTpgagdtlwvtitvransnsfSrpFSs
In Pike's notation there are 5 main components (which are indicated using the example above):
- M - manner of production (i.e., MaIlDe)
- C - manner of controlling (i.e., CVoeIpvnn)
- description of stricture (i.e., what APpaatdtltnransnsfSpvavdtlvtnransssfTpgagdtlwvtitvransnsf)
- S - segment type (i.e., Srp)
- F - phonetic function (i.e., FSs)
The components of the notational hierarchy of this consonant are explained below:
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