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    Phonetics and Phonology Homo Sapiens Homo Loquens

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    Joel Cabusao Lacay
    The document discusses the fields of phonetics and phonology, noting that phonetics objectively describes sounds and their articulation while phonology focuses on the language-specific organization and patterning of sounds. It explains that while humans can produce a wide range of sounds, each language only uses a subset, and phonology examines the sound system that makes a particular language like English unique. The summary also touches on how phonological knowledge is intuitive for speakers of a language even if they cannot explicitly articulate the rules.

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    Phonetics and Phonology Homo Sapiens Homo Loquens

    Uploaded by

    Joel Cabusao Lacay
    55 views2 pages
    The document discusses the fields of phonetics and phonology, noting that phonetics objectively describes sounds and their articulation while phonology focuses on the language-specific organization and patterning of sounds. It explains that while humans can produce a wide range of sounds, each language only uses a subset, and phonology examines the sound system that makes a particular language like English unique. The summary also touches on how phonological knowledge is intuitive for speakers of a language even if they cannot explicitly articulate the rules.

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    The document discusses the fields of phonetics and phonology, noting that phonetics objectively describes sounds and their articulation while phonology focuses on the language-specific organization and patterning of sounds. It explains that while humans can produce a wide range of sounds, each language only uses a subset, and phonology examines the sound system that makes a particular language like English unique. The summary also touches on how phonological knowledge is intuitive for speakers of a language even if they cannot explicitly articulate the rules.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    55 views2 pages

    Phonetics and Phonology Homo Sapiens Homo Loquens

    Uploaded by

    Joel Cabusao Lacay
    The document discusses the fields of phonetics and phonology, noting that phonetics objectively describes sounds and their articulation while phonology focuses on the language-specific organization and patterning of sounds. It explains that while humans can produce a wide range of sounds, each language only uses a subset, and phonology examines the sound system that makes a particular language like English unique. The summary also touches on how phonological knowledge is intuitive for speakers of a language even if they cannot explicitly articulate the rules.

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    Non-words with unpredictable meanings

    13 Conclusion: words versus lexical items


    1 4 Taking words apart
    15 Kinds of morpheme: bound versus free

    16 Kinds of morpheme: root, affix, combining form

    1.1 Phonetics and phonology

    Although our species has the scientific name Homo sapiens, ‘thinking human’, it
    has often been suggested that an even more appropriate name would be Homo loquens, or
    ‘speaking human’. Many species have sound-based signalling systems, and can communicate
    with other members of the same species on various topics of mutual interest, like approaching
    danger or where the next meal is coming from.
    Most humans (leaving aside for now native users of sign languages) also use sounds for
    linguistic signalling; but the structure of the human vocal organs allows a particularly wide range
    of sounds to be used, and they are also put together in an extraordinarily sophisticated way.
    There are two subdisciplines in linguistics which deal with sound, namely
    phonetics and phonology, and to fulfil the aim of this book, which is to provide an outline
    of the sounds of various English accents and how those sounds combine and pattern
    together, we will need aspects of both. Phonetics provides objective ways of describing
    and analysing the range of sounds humans use in their languages. More specifically,
    articulatory phonetics identifies precisely which speech organs and muscles are involved in
    producing the different sounds of the world’s languages. Those sounds are then transmitted from
    the speaker to the hearer, and acoustic and have on a hearer’s ears and brain. It follows
    that phonetics has strong associations with anatomy, physiology, physics and neurology.

    However, although knowing what sounds we can in principle make and use is part
    of understanding what makes us human, each person grows up learning and speaking
    only a particular human language or languages, and each language only makes use of a subset
    of the full range of possible, producible and distinguishable sounds.
    When we turn to the characteristics of the English sound system that make it
    specifically English, and different from French or Welsh or Quechua, we move into the domain
    of phonology, which is the language-specific selection and organisation of sounds to signal
    meanings.
    Phonologists are interested in the sound patterns of particular languages, and in
    what speakers and hearers need to know, and children need to learn, to be speakers of those
    languages: in that sense, it is close to psychology.
    Our phonological knowledge is not something we can necessarily access and talk
    about in detail: we often have intuitions about language without knowing where they come from,
    or exactly how to express them. But the knowledge is certainly there. For instance, speakers of
    English will tend to agree that the word snilis a possible but non-existent word,whereas *fnilis
    not possible (as the asterisk conventionally shows). In the usual linguistic terms, snil is an
    accidental gap in the vocabulary, while*fnil

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