Phonetics and Phonology (eng507)
Topic-002: Introduction to the Course (Why studying phonetics and phonology)
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| Topic-002: Introduction to the Course (Why studying phonetics and phonology) In a very simple sense, linguistics is the study of language how it is put together and how it functions. In other words, various building blocks of different types and sizes are combined to makeup a language. For example, sounds are brought together and sometimes when this happens they change their form and do interesting things (phonetics and phonology. Words are arranged in a certain order (syntax, and sometimes the beginnings and endings of the words are changed to adjust the meaning (morphology. Then the meaning itself can be affected by the arrangement of words (semantics) and by the knowledge of the speaker about what the hearer will understand (pragmatics. Linguistics is the study of all of these fields. So, like other branches, such as syntax, morphology and semantics, phonetics and phonology is the branch of linguistics which deals with the human speech sounds. It is the study of the description of speech sounds such as vowels (monophthongs and diphthongs) and consonants. In this subject, we study the sets of phonemes and sound patterns (e.g., dynamic as in connected speech, and static as in isolation) within a human language. Among other things, expertise in phonetics and phonology enable researchers to describe spoken languages which are not yet documented thus proving very important for language documentation and language description. Similarly, it is an important field for typological studies and for cross linguistic comparisons and generalizations in terms of sound systems (languages) and their classifications. Copyright Virtual University of Pakistan |