(1) Phonetics and Phonology: Defining the Discipline

- both describe the sounds + the combinatory possibilities of the sounds and the prosody of the language (how pitch, loudness and length work to produce accent, rhythm, and intonation)

Phonetics

- describes the speech sounds that occur in the languages of the world

- conc. with the concrete characteristics of the sounds (articulatory, acoustic, auditory)

- determines the nature of the sounds, their patterns, and aspects of the sounds necessary for conveying the meaning

- phone = the basic unit of phonetics, the smallest identifiable unit found in a stream of speech that is able to be transcribed with an IPA symbol, a concrete realisation of a phoneme

- allophone = a phonetic variant of a phoneme in a particular language, the basis for narrow phonetic transcription []

Phonology

- describes the systems and patterns of sounds in a language

- conc. with the function of the sounds in a systemic way in a particular language

- determines its distinctive sounds, establishes a set of rules to describe the changes in these sounds in different relationships with other sounds

- the phonology of a language = the set of rules describing the changes in the underlying sounds (or, phonemes) occurring in speech

- phonemics = the traditional approach to phonology, analyses the stream of speech into a sequence of contrastive segments ("contrastive" = "contrasting with other segments which might change the meaning")

- phoneme = the basic unit of phonology, an abstract unit, not a single sound but a group of sounds used to differentiate words

- the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language, defined according to its allophones and environments (American structuralist tradition) or as a set of distinctive features (generative tradition)

- the basis for writing down a language to record the variations btw sounds used to differentiate meaning = broad phonemic transcription //

- a word can be realised by a single phoneme (e.g. I, oh, ah)