How is phonetics different from phonology.docx

How is phonetics different from phonologyHow is phonetics different from phonology? Generally speaking, phonetics and phonology are branches of linguistics. They are all concerned with the same aspects of language the speech sounds. However, to be specific,there are some differences between these two studies. First,phonetics study all the sounds of that occur in the worlds language,while phonology study one specific language among all the languages in the world. Phonetics does not specialized in one particular language,put another way,any speech sounds,as long as it is a sound occurs in human beings language,is studied by phoneticians. Phonology studies speech sounds in an independent language.The language can be arbitrary,no matter it is Chinese,English or any other language,which exists or existed as a human language. Second,phonetics is more about the “sound” itself,while phonology aims to discover something beyond “sound”.In other words,the former is of a general nature,which deals with problems like how speech sounds are produced,what phonetic features they possess,how they can be classified and so on.On the other hand,phonology focuses on how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.As far as I am concerned,the branches of phonetics are articulatory phonetics,auditory phonetics and acoustic phonetics.Articulatory phonetics studies how a speaker uses speech organs to articulate the sounds;auditory phonetics studies how the sounds are perceived by the hearer;acoustic phonetics studies the sounds travel by looking at the sound waves,the physical means by which sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to one another.Phonology pays more attention to the mutual influence between one sound and others and the inner connnection between sounds and meaning distinguishing.To be detailed,phonology has its systematic rules which decide certain sounds can be combined together and under which circumstance one sound can be changed by another and so on.Despite from rules in phonology,suprasegmental features of sounds such as stress,tone,and intonation are the phonological properties of such units as the syllable,the word,and the sentence. From a junior linguistics learners point of view,I think that phonetics is more concrete and phonology is more abstract concerning the study of speech sounds,but both of them are indispensable parts of linguistics.