Introducing Phonology

What is phonology?

Phonology is one of the core fields that compose the discipline of linguistics, which is the scientific study of language structure. One way to understand the subject matter of phonology is to contrast it with other fields within linguistics. A very brief explanation is that phonology is the study of sound structure in language, which is different from the study of sentence structure (syntax), word structure (morphology), or how languages change over time (historical linguistics). But this is insufficient. An important feature of the structure of a sentence is how it is pronounced – its sound structure. The pronunciation of a given word is also a fundamental part of the structure of the word. And certainly the principles of pronunciation in a language are subject to change over time. So phonology has a relationship to numerous domains of linguistics.

An important question is how phonology differs from the closely related discipline of phonetics. Making a principled separation between phonetics and phonology is difficult – just as it is difficult to make a principled separation between physics and chemistry, or sociology and anthropology. While phonetics and phonology both deal with language sound, they address different aspects of sound. Phonetics deals with “actual” physical sounds as they are manifested in human speech, and concentrates on acoustic waveforms, formant values, measurements of duration measured in milliseconds, of amplitude and frequency. Phonetics also deals with the physical principles underlying the production of sounds, namely vocal tract resonances, and the muscles and other articulatory structures used to produce those resonances. Phonology, on the other hand, is an abstract cognitive system dealing with rules in a mental grammar: principles of subconscious “thought” as they relate to language sound.

Yet once we look into the central questions of phonology in greater depth, we will find that the boundaries between the disciplines of phonetics and phonology are not entirely clear-cut. As research in both of these fields has progressed, it has become apparent that a better understanding of many issues in phonology requires that you bring phonetics into consideration, just as a phonological analysis is a prerequisite for phonetic study of language.