The Distinction Between Phonetics and Phonology (2)
As it has been mentioned above, phonetics is the study of of how speech sounds are made , transmitted, and received. It is a subject that requires as its source of data a human being with an intact auditory mechanism and a funcitioning set of vocal organs. The person's particular language background is not stricly relevant: phoneticians would draw the same conclusions about the production and reception of speech whether they are dealing with the speakers of English, Hindi, or Bahasa Indonesia. Although the categories of the sounds of speech can be used fot the analysis of any language, that section provides no information about the way these categories these categories are actually used, in the language of the world.By contrast, the primary aim of phonology is to discover the principle that govern the way sounds are organized in language, and to expalin the variations that occur. A common methodology to begin by analysing an individual language, to determine which sound units are used and how they pattern - the language's phonological structures'. The properties of different sound systems are the compared and hyphotheses developed about the rules underlying groups of languages, and ultimately in all languages (phonological universal).
The distinction between phonology and phonetics can be seen from a second point of view. The human vocal apparatus can produce a very wide range of sounds; but only a small number of these are used in a language to construct all of its words and sentences. Phonetics is the study of all possible speech sounds; phonology studies the way in which a language's speakers systematically use a selection of these sounds in order to express meaning.
There is a further way of drawing the distinction. No two speakers have anatomically identical vocal tracts , and thus no-one prononces sounds in exactly the same way as anyone else. There is even a considerable amount of variation in the sounds of a single speaker. Yet when using our language we are able to discount much of this variation, and focus on only those sounds, or properties of sounds, that are important to the communication of meaning.
posted by Rini Ekayati :: Linguistics :: @ 4:57 PM
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