Introduction to phonetics

What is phonetics?

Language is one of the distinctive characteristics of human beings. Without formal instruction, we learn from infanthood the skills that we need to be [successful users of a language. For most of us, this will be spoken language, though for some it will be a signed language. In acquiring language, we learn words, and how to put them together; we learn to link words and sentences to meaning; we learn how to use these structures to get what we want, to say how we feel, and to form social bonds with others; and we also learn how to sound like members of the community around us – or perhaps choose to sound different from them.

Linguistics is the formal study of language. Its main sub-disciplines are: syntax, the study of sentence structure; semantics, the study of meaning; pragmatics, the study of meaning in context; morphology, the study of word structure; sociolinguistics, the study of language in its social context; phonology, the study of sound systems; and phonetics, the study of the sounds of speech.We will be mindful that linguistically significant aspects of the sounds of a language have to do with meaning on some level, whether it is to distinguish words from each other, to join together words of particular kinds, to mark (or do) something social, such as where the speaker comes from, or to handle the flow of talk in a conversation.

Language and speech are often distinguished in linguistics. For many, linguistics constitutes a set of claims about human beings’ universal cognitive or biological capacities. Most of the constructs of linguistics are attempts at explaining commonalities between members of com - munities which use language, and they are abstract.

Phonetics on the other hand is the systematic study of the sounds of speech, which is physical and directly observable. Phonetics is sometimes seen as not properly linguistic, because it is the outward, physical manifestation of the main object of linguistic research, which is language (not speech): and language is abstract.

On the other hand, setting aside Deaf signing communities, speech is the commonest and primary form of language. Most of our interactions, with family members, colleagues, people we buy things from or whom we ask for help, are done through the medium of speech. There is a primacy about the spoken form of language which means that for us to understand questions like “what is the possible form of a word?”, “how do you ask questions in this language?”, “why does this speaker use that particular pronunciation, and not some other?”, we need to have an understanding of phonetics

Speech is produced by the controlled movement of air through the throat, mouth and nose (more technically known as the vocal tract). It can be studied in a number of different ways:

• articulatory phonetics (how speech sounds are made in the body)

• acoustic phonetics (the physical properties of the sounds that are made)

• perception (what happens to the speech signal once the sound wave reaches the listener’s ear).

The linguistic phonetic study of a language involves working out how the sounds of language (the ‘phonetic’ part) are used to make meaning (which is what makes it ‘linguistic’, and not just the study of the sounds we can make with our bodies): how words are shaped, how they are put together, how similar (but different) strings of sounds can be distinguished (such as ‘I scream’ and ‘ice cream’), how particular shades of meaning are conveyed, and how the details of speech relate systematically to its inherently social context.

One of the central paradoxes of phonetics is that we make observations of individuals in order to understand something about the way groups of people behave. This is good in the sense that we can use ourselves and the people around us as representatives of groups; it is bad in that we cannot always be sure how representative someone is, and there is always the possibility that what we observe is just an idiosyncratic habit. We will mostly skirt round this issue: there are (surprisingly) still many things that are not known about English phonetics, we will make observations of English-speaking communities and individuals in order to show how the phonetic potential of the vocal tract is used by speakers of English, in various settings.