UNIT 1: PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

UNIT 1: PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

1. 1. Linguisitcs and Phonetics

   • Phonetics and phonology is the branch of linguistics which studies the sounds of language. It analyses the nature, systematisation and communicative function of components of speech. They cannot be separated form the other linguistic sciences because they are intimately related
     • Is no longer viewed as a taxonomic discipline which merely deals with the description and classification of sounds.
       • Due to the nature of communication through speech, the study of sounds in a broad new covers a remarkably wide domain, embracing aspects of the social sciences, life sciences, engineering sciences and information sciences, being than related not only to linguistics but also to disciplines as different as sociology, anthropology, philosophy, neurology, medicine...
   • Letter and sounds: Never mixed up. Letters are written and sounds are spoken. Ortography and pronuniciation don't correspond each other
   • Sounds and sound group: A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. The sound is the basic unit of language's phonology
     • Phoneme + Others = Word. A phoneme also is the minimal distinctive unit in the phonology which serves to distinguish meaning
       • Minimal pairs are the pairs words that differ in meaning through a constrast of a single phoneme (//)
         • Allophones are different speech sounds that are relizations of the same phoneme ([]). So, they're considered as variants of a phoneme which occur in specific phonetic contexts
   • Words and utterances: W don't speak in single words and not in single sounds. Sounds and words are connected together with others to make up longer utterances.
     • Utterances must be pronouncedsmoothly without hesitations and without stumbling over the combination of sounds
       • In English utterances, some words are more important than others, they're pronounced differently
         • Rhythm and sentence stress and Intonation