APPLIED PHONETICS Class 1: Introduction to

AND PHONOLOGY phonetics

 WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols for making meaning and expressing ideas by
speech sounds combined into words, words into sentences, etc, to express ideas and thoughts
and in which a social group cooperates.
Characteristics of Language:
 Human  it’s produced and used by humans.
 Social  it is used by a community of people.
Communication  the objective is to express information of all sorts (ideas, thoughts,
feelings, warnings, stories, etc.)
 System  it has rules and patterns that define it.
Conventional  it is arbitrary, non-instinctive, agreed by the social group.
 Symbols  Relation between “word” and concept is not direct (world-thought-word).
 Oral  vocal sounds, speech production.
 Written  written representation of speech.
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE:
LINGUISTICS
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Its purpose is to understand Language
as a social and cognitive phenomenon. It has different sub-disciplines, that we could
divide into basic, applied and inter-disciplinary.
 Basic Linguistic disciplines: are the ones that deal with understanding the
compositional and structural characteristics and properties of a language, which
include sound production and combinations, word-meaning connection, word
combination rules, language in use, language history, among others.
 Applied linguistics: it varies greatly on how it approaches the way in which the
study of language can be used into teaching, politics, identity, and many other areas.
It “applies” the understanding of basic linguistics into analyzing or structuring more
“complex” social phenomena.
 Inter-disciplinary linguistics: are disciplines that have “mixed” with other
disciplines in terms of objectives and methodologies to understand the phenomena
more comprehensively.
EXAMPLES OF LINGUISTIC
DISCIPLINES
 The most common examples of Basic Linguistics:
 Phonetics and Phonology
 Morphosyntax (AKA “grammar” in common knowledge)
 Semantics and Pragmatics

Some common examples of Applied Linguistics:

 Second Language acquisition and learning / Teaching
 Forensic linguistics
 Genre and identity studies

The most common examples of Interdisciplinary Linguistics:

 Socio-linguistics
 Psycholinguistics
 Cognitive linguistics
PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce (make) and
perceive (understand) sounds. It’s the study the physical properties of speech.
 Acoustic phonetics: Physics of speech sounds
 Articulatory phonetics: How humans produce speech
 Auditory phonetics: How humans perceive speech as language.

Before recording devices were available, phoneticians relied upon phonetic

transcription systems. The most widely used now is the International Phonetic
Alphabet.
Phonology is a branch that describes the way sounds function within a given
language or across languages to encode meaning. It is the study of the sound system
of a given language. Phonology relies on applied phonetics to describe it’s object of
study.
KEY CONCEPTS
1. Phone: Minimal linguistic unit of phonetics, a speech sound (physical wave). It is a
physical phenomena.
2. Phoneme: Minimal distinctive unit of speech in a language that distinguishes a word
from another. It is an abstract concept that groups different variants of pronunciation.
3. Allophone: each of the sounds that are variants of a phoneme. The actual realizations
of the abstract phoneme. Allophones of a phoneme usually are in complementary
distribution.
4. Grapheme: In written language, the smallest unit of the writing system. Different
writing systems have different types of correspondence between grapheme and sound.
Alphabetic writing systems were supposedly a one-to-one correspondence, but there
are inconsistencies given by historical reasons.
5. IPA Symbol: written representation of actual speech, used for studying oral language.
Its “meaning” is the articulatory definition of a phoneme.
FURTHER INFORMATION
In the following 2 links, you can find further information that kind of justifies why
we need to learn a Little about phonetics and phonology when learning a foreign
language, especially English.
Modern writing systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9noNcgJXQPY
 Why is English spelling so damn weird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=EqLiRu34kWo