Is phonetics science or art?

Which aspect of phonetics is more important for a second language student of liguistics?

I think that no one will argue that human speech is an art. But it is taken for granted. And really all the children acquire the ability to speak very easily, without thinking. They in fact pick up the language. But later, when they face the problem of speaking English as a foreign language at later age, they are surprised that they should take pains to do it. So they need some knowledge, a lot of practice and motivation.

Phonetics as an academic discipline which is concerned with speech, is primarily, one of the linguistic sciences. And it largely depends on other sciences, such as psychology, physiology and acoustics and others. It has practical implications in linguistics, language teaching, speech pathology, communication engineering.

Being a branch of linguistics, phonetics in its own turn is closely connected with other linguistic sciences: grammar, lexicology, stylistics and the history of the language, since the phonetic system of a language, its vocabulary and grammar constitute one indivisible whole. It is also closely interconnected with physiology, biology, physics, pedagogy, psychology, mathematics, cybernetics.

Phonetics is subdivided into several main branches, depending on the sound phenomena studied. They are: Articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, experimental phonetics, phonology or functional phonetics. Akhmanova also distinguishes historical phonetics, general phonetics, descriptive phonetics and other types.

Articulatory phonetics is the oldest branch of linguistics that investigates the ways in which sounds are made. Here the phonetician is trained to recognize, produce and analyze speech sounds. This is what you do at the practical lessons of phonetics.

Acoustic phonetics is concerned with the study of speech as heard: that is its waveform. For the sounds of speech this waveform is called spectrogram, for the speech melody it is intonogram, which shows fundamental frequency, duration and energy of speech.

Experimental phonetics usually involves the manipulation of the waveform and makes psychoacoustic tests to identify which aspects are essential for understanding, and for recognition of linguistic categories.

Phonology or functional phonetics is a purely linguistic branch of phonetics. Sometimes called linguistic phonetics. It deals with the functional aspects of sound phenomena. Phonology sets out to discover those segmental and prosodic features that have differential value in a language, and it establishes the system of phonemes and prosodemes. Phonology of segmental units is called phonemics and phonology of intonation is termed intonology (or prosodemics). Phonology is concerned with a sound system as a system of contrastive units, phonemes, and their distinctive features. Phonetics takes care of the physical properties of sound, while phonology focuses on their functional characteristics

As I’ve already mentioned, besides these branches there also exist other branches of phonetics, such as special, general, historical, descriptive, comparative, applied.

Special phonetics is concerned with the study of the phonetic system of a concrete language. When the phonetic system is studied in its static form at a particular period, we deal with descriptive phonetics, when it is studied in its historical development we speak about historical phonetics.

General phonetics studies sound-producing possibilities and the functioning of speech mechanism.

Theoretical phonetics applies theories to the language it analyzes.

Comparative phonetics is concerned with the comparative study of the phonetic systems of two or more languages.

Let’s go back to the phonetics and communication process. Communication depends on mutual intelligibility and cultural awareness. All the phonetic aspects, such as pronunciation of segments (vowels and consonants), and suprasegmental features (word stress, rhythm and intonation) are important and meaningful for successful communication. Communication failures or intercultural misunderstanding may depend on a range of phonetic features: pronunciation of segments, word stress misplacement, change of rhythm type, intonation patterns. There are very examples of it in the book by Shevchenko. Let me show you some of them:

Vowels

A Russian colleague was entertaining an American guest in her home and cooked a meal of veal heart with vegetables. When she said {ha:t}, the American guest said that he really liked his meal [ha:t], meaning [hot]. It was a good thing that the meal was really warm enough. The thing is that in the American pronunciation the short back vowel (o) is reflected as [a] vowel.

Word stress

In Scotland the British guide speaking Russian promised the tourists they would see Scottish [valenki]. It turned out later that she meant волынки Scottish pipes. That was a surprise, a bit probably disappointing as Shevchenko puts it.