Phonetics as a linguistic science. Branches of phonetics. Phonetics and
4 main branches of phonetics: Articulatory/physiological - concerned with the study of sounds as the result of the activities of the speech organs; it deals with our voice-producing mechanism and the way we produce sounds; Perceptual/auditory - study of man's perception of segmental sounds, pitch variation, loudness and duration; Acoustic/physical - acoustic aspect of speech sounds (pitch, spectrum, timber, loudness, length).
Functional/linguistic/phonology - deals with the functional aspect of sound phenomena. Phonology sets out to discover those segmental and prosodic features that have a differential value in a language, and it established the system of phonemes.