What's the difference between phonetics and phonology?

Having practiced armchair linguistics for some years I should be able to sum up the difference off the top of my head, yet often I don't know which term to use. And looking them up on Wikipedia doesn't help a lot. Wikipedia on phonology:

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with "the sounds of language".

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech.

Can it be that the difference is that phonology deals with language sounds and phonetics deals with human speech sounds? And if so, well what does that mean?

You can consider this a test case of a naive questioner asking expert answerers, but I really do get them confused.

Here's a humorous illustration I sometimes use in introductory courses: specgram.com/CLIII.1/09.parenchyma.cartoon.e.html

The two have different histories of study, but in my understanding, there is no theoretical distinction between phonology and phonetics. Look though you will, I don't think you'll ever find a satisfying answer to your question.

15 Answers 15

Phonetics is about the physical aspect of sounds.

In phonetics, sounds are called phones.

Phonetics has subcategories where it studies different kinds of sounds.

But in general, we usually mean articulatory phonetics: the study of the production of speech sounds, by the articulatory and vocal tract of a speaker, and also their perception.

Phonetic transcriptions are done using square brackets like these: [ ] .

Phonology studies the abstract aspect of sounds.

In phonology, sounds are called phonemes.

Phonology is about establishing what are the phonemes in a given language, where a “phoneme” is defined as a sound that brings a difference in the meaning of a word.

Consider the following minimal pairs, in which a change in sound causes a change in word, and meaning:

This example is in Italian:

1. pèsca (-> /ɛ/) means “peach”
2. pésca -> /e/ means “fishing”

Phonemic transcriptions adopt the slash, like this: / / .

A phoneme is a “phonic segment” - a unit from phonetics - plus a linguistic “meaning value”.

Ah I think one thing that keeps me confusing them is terms like "phonetic transcription" which often deal in phonemes but phonemes belong to phonology and not phonetics \-:

I added that part to the answer, it looked better there. :) By the way, I think this is one of the things that every student studying Linguistics have wondered about.

Actually, a phonetic transcription should just deal with "phones" not "phonemes" - which belong to phonemic transcription. But that probably doesn't make it too much clearer!

Yes when people want to contrast phonetic and phonemic transcriptions they use the right term. But otherwise phonetic transcription is naively used to cover both so it's more vague or ambiguous. Think phrasebooks, non-linguists talking about languages in online forums etc.

My advisor, Dennis Preston, used to tell students that the ear hears phonetics, but the brain hears phonology. That is, your ear is capable of processing whatever linguistic sounds are given to it (assuming someone with normal hearing), but your language experience causes your brain to filter out only those sound patterns that are important to your language(s).

Of course, this summary simplifies things considerably. Phonologists are often as interested in patterns related to the manner of articulation as they are the patterns of the speech waves. Phoneticians, meanwhile, would have no way to analyze their data sets if they didn't have phonological categories to help organize them.

Generally, phonetics is the study of fine grained details of those sounds, while phonology has traditionally dealt with analysis of greater abstractions. For understandable reasons, the line between the two discipliens is blurring, particularly as our modeling capabilities become more sophisticated. Still, the distinction is useful.

I think the big difficulty with the phonetics-phonology divide is not only that linguists don't even really agree on the difference but also that there doesn't exist a good analogy with any other pair of subfields.

This is the way I've seen it (cards on the table, although there are more extreme folks, I'm fairly far on the "phonology doesn't exist" camp, and that is probably influencing my answers).

Phonology is the study of the cognitive processes that turn words into instructions to hand down to the physical body parts that produce the sounds. These instructions, personified into human commands, might sound like, "close your lips, now move your tongue to touch your alveolar ridge; begin lowering the diaphragm at a normal rate and constrict the vocal chords to this degree". On the acoustic side, phonology's role is much harder to specify (at least to me), but I would say that the "phonology" center takes in sequences/matricies of interpreted linguistic features, for example "between 442-488ms, palatalization level 2". Phonology would then turn that into the abstract "underlying" representations that can be mapped to morphological parsers and the lexicon.

Phonetics is the study of how the "commands" end up translating into specific articulator and vocal tract movements. For instance, how the command to retract the tongue at some particular time "really" maps to minute physical details like exactly when tongue section X touches mouth section Y and then in turn how that affects parts of the resultant acoustic signal. Phonetics also makes observations of how certain groups of instructions can cause very specific consequences. On the acoustic side, phonetics turns the mental spectrogram we receive from the nerve endings in our cochleas into feature sets and timings of the sort that it received from the phonological center during articulation.

Articulatory phonology is an attempt to consolidate the two, that, as far as I can tell, is basically phonetics taken one level deeper to receive underlying segments as inputs. And articulatory phonology moves a lot of what was in phonology proper as cognitive processes into physically motivated processes during articulation.

In short, nobody really knows the difference, but the broad agreement is that phonetics is lower-level and more articulator-centric and phonology is higher-level and more cognition-centric.