Phonetics and Phonology

 

What is Phonetics?

Phonetics is divided into three subbranches:
articulator phonetics, acoustic phonetics, sensorial phonetics, or perceptual phonetics. Each one of them is concerned with different features of the production sounds.

      Phonetics involves places of articulation, voicing, and the mental process to produce different sounds, thus phonetics is concerned production of sounds, how and where they are produced in the vocal tract. According to Iyabode, O. D. (2011) “phonetics essentially seeks to trace the process physiologically involve in sound production” (pp. 1), in other words, the Author says, “that phonetics describes the production process involve in physical sounds” (pp. 2).

      The process of articulation to sound production involves the organs of the vocal tract, those organs are the lungs palate, uvula pharynx, epiglottis, glottis, and vocal cords. They are adapting to produce speech in humans. 

Articulators involved in sound production.

Places of articulation

We have a mechanism called “airstream” which allows ejecting the air from the lungs, thanks to it the air and the lungs work both to shape the sounds.
Iyabode, O. D. (2011) “The English language normally makes use of the pulmonic aggressive air stream mechanism” (p.p 6). It means that the air is ejected from the lungs to the lips to produce sounds (phonemes). There are different mechanisms to produce sounds like glottalic, velaric, pulmonic, and three states of the glottis that allow the voiceless and voice sounds.
The articulatory features describe the modes and places which is production sounds in the vocal tract, thus like vibration to them. The articulators are adapted to produce speech in humans, through the air stream from the lungs to the mouth. Different airstream mechanisms such as glottalic, velaric, pulmonic, and three states of the glottis allow the voiceless and voice sounds.

What is the Phonology?

This branch of linguistics studies the phonologic system in which employing the studies of the sound (phoneme) that have a proper meaning in a language, allows the creation of words and thus building a language. Phonology concerns phonemes (sound), allophones, and a variety of phonemes. Adeyanju (2003) says “phonology provides the information that has to do with the functional pattering of the sounds in the language.” (Iyabode, O. D. 2011, pp. 2).

    

The difference between phonetics and

Phonology.

Although both branches study the sound that is produced in each language, each one of these branches studies the different features of the sounds. Phonetics studies how and where the vocal tract produces or articulating sounds (phonemes), it is a process physiological in which involves acoustic, voicing, part sensorial of our brain, places, and modes of articulation of the different sounds, while phonology studies through phonologic system sound to obtain letter became in words than having a proper meaning in a language, this means that phonology studies linguistic organization of sounds in a language.
In other words, phonetics is concerned with sound and how and where they are produced, while phonology is concerned with how sound became in graphemes and those became in words, and these give a means in the different contexts of a language.