The New Field of Research in Phonetics

Abstract

There is but a relative difference between phonetics and phonology. The two branches of science take the same thing as their objects of investigation in the long run, standing in a reverse relation to each other in point of the importance attached to the complex processes of producing speech-sounds. With the, help of metaphor one might rightly say that the same mountain is traced from the top to the foot in the one branch of study and from the foot to the top in the other. It is practically permissible to define phonology as the science of the phonic elements of language in the same manner as we define phonetics as the science of speech-sounds.
Language is an instrument common to both the speaker and the hearer, or, to put it more correctly, a mental property belonging to all the members of a speech-community. Hence the social nature of language. And it is this very nature that creates and develops the system of abstract linguistic sounds on the basis of concrete speech-sounds. From the linguo-psychological point of view, linguistic sounds are found to be the socially conceptionalized presentations of speech-sounds emitted by, and heard from, innumerable speakers. In other words, the speaker who has stored up the abovementioned phonic presentations in the cerebrum, picks them up from this hoard and has them emitted through the vocal organs. Nevertheless, those phonic presentations, once emitted in this manner, are no longer presentations, but turn into speech-sounds which are much more complicated than the original presentations according to the speaker's psychology and the situation wherein speech occurs.
These complex activities should be studied with special reference to the physiology of the cerebrum including ever-increasing results of medical research into aphasia. Phonetics which demands a closer physiological observation on the vocal and the auditory organs, must grapple with new problems as to the cerebral cortex in connection with them.