LANGUAGE AND SPEECH

The relationship between language and speech has been a crucial issue of linguistics since Saussure and it is characteristically a linguistic problem of this century. Formerly, our literary inheritance and written texts constituted the subject matter of the investigations of both historical and comparative linguistics.

The dichotomy of language and speech was brought into the focus of attention by the coming to the fore of the study of living languages and the development and consolidation of synchronic linguistics. It was the invention of the means of recording the word of mouth, living speech, on sound film tracks, gramophone records and later on magnetic tapes, and the concomitant spread of the gramophone and the tape-recorder which provided the opportunity to submit speech events to better and more extensive observation, analysis and exact description.

Language is considered to be a system of symbols whereby we can communicate our thoughts and emotions to others and at the same time understand others. Thus language is a means of human communication. Characteristic features of language are the high degree of abstraction and, related to this, the stability, wide combinability, high degree of internal organization and orderedness of its elements, to mention only the most important ones. Language is essentially a general human semiotic system.

On the other hand, speech is a means of the functioning of language. Speech is the realization of the semiotic system by biological means, i.e., the material reality of the acoustic vibrations produced by the articulatory organs and perceived by the hearing organs of man are stimuli which can be grasped by the brain centre. Thus speech is that form of language which can be produced by oyr articulatory organs and perceived by our senses.

The Dictionary of the Hungarian Language gives the following definition of speech as linguistic terminus technicus: “The loud, individual expressive and communicative utilization by the articulatory organs of the system of linguistic symbols existing in the consciousness of a community, and the result of that utilization.” (Vol. 1, p.575.) Henceforward speech will be examined as the form of the functioning of language. The terms speech chain and speech stream will also be used in that sense.

STAGES OF THE SPEECH CHAIN (SPEECH STREAM)

By speech chain we mean the string of signals which transmits the linguistic content (information, message) through the communication channel from the speaker (transmitter) to the listener (receiver), i.e. from the sender to the addressee. The flow of speech signals transmitting a message through the communication channel is two-directional.

In the course of an exchange of thoughts the speaker and the listener alternate with each other in accordance with their communicative intentions, moreover, in certain cases even simultaneous signals can be emitted by both partners. (This is the case of crosstalking.) The human (biological) signalling system, the speech producing and speech perceiving apparatus of man, ensures the feedback of one’s own signals, too, i.e. ensures self-control.

We have seen that speech phenomena are the embodiment of linguistic symbols and symbol-combinations, which in turn are the manifestations of semantic, semiotic entities. The task of phonetics in the examination of speech phenomena is twofold. On the one hand it has to examine the complexes of speech signals from a material, substantial point of view. It has to examine the inherent internal structures of speech, its structural build-up, its structural components, the biophysiological mechanism of building up sound strings, the production and perception of sound vibrations, i.e.

On the other hand, it is also the task of phonetics to establish the relationships and correspondences between elements of speech and linguistic symbols, between elements of speech and semantic units. From the above it directly follows that the subject matter of phonetics is not merely the speech sound, but rather the whole process, the entire speech chain. Let us make a closer inspection of the speech chain. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to add two brief remarks: a) We consider the span of the speech act to last from the birth of the communicative intention up to the decoding of the communicated message, b) The spatial dimensions of the speech act are provided by the distance between the brain centre of the speaker and that of the listener, which consists of the following parts (media): channels within the sender’s body—outer air-space—channels within the addressee’s body.

The smallest element of speech is the speech sound, which starts with the coding of the phoneme in the course of speech production (encoding) and, taking up different forms of manifestation (neuremej—kineme—acouseme—sonus = element of auditory sensation— пеигетег) at the different stages of the speech chain, ends with the decoding of the phoneme in the listener’s brain.

On the basis of the forms of existence and manifestation of the signal complexes the speech chain can be divided into the five significantly different stages, seen in Figure 1. (Figures follai the text,) These are the following:

This brief sketch convincingly proves that the process of speech, which is seemingly so simple, its details rarely penetrating our consciousness, is actually a very intricate complex of phenomena and belongs to the competence of several specialized disciplines.

The different forms in which the speech signal manifests itself constitute an organic whole and none of them can be eliminated or left out without eliminating speech itself. By picking out, examining and analysing only one link of the chain we would fail to give a full and objective account of speech. Only the whole chain represents the real complexity in which speech can be grasped, its motion and function mechanisms examined, the linguistic interpretation and functional value-scale of speech forms ultimately determined.

As yet we know little of the manner in which speech comes into being. New findings can be expected from research in cellular biology. Anatomy has satisfactorily explored the structure of the brain. Physiology has managed to localize in the cerebral cortex the spheres of sight, hearing and speech.

I suppose this is where the problem of speech sounds versus phonemes has its solution, too. P. S. Kuznetsov’s statement is very instructive in this respect: “If, in the brain centre, in the linguistic consciousness of man, there did not exist an abstract analogue of the formal encoding of the message, which corresponds to the phonological system of language, then man would not have been able to produce alphabetical writing out of the continuous strings of speech sounds long before the advent of linguistics.”[1]

Once we are setting up hypotheses, let us add another to their number. How is language stored and how can it be mobilized in our brain centre? Besides the sensory and motory spheres of the brain there are probably other functional spheres which are still unknown. For the storage of the linguistic system the sensory sphere must contain three kinds of memory: semantic, grammatical or structural-relational, and realizational. The expression of language in speech is realized by means of the last type. For the use and encoding of the symbol reserve stored in the memory we must hypothesize a so-called thought-triggering operational system in the motory sphere. Such is the model which we can visualize for the functioning of language ; it is the articulatory program in the human brain at the stage of the birth of speech.

The hypothesized articulatory program reaches the executive speech organs through the nerve tracks. The articulatory mechanism of speech constitutes the most developed branch of phonetics. Descriptions of this kind can be found in every school textbook. We only add here that speech at this stage is nothing but a string of motion complexes, constantly repeated motion stereotypes, which originate in the coordinated functioning of the articulatory organs, which in turn are controlled through the nerve tracks and set in motion by the muscles.

At this stage, the universal character of human speech manifests itself in that articulation is based on common anatomical grounds for speakers of all languages and is the result of essentially the same physiological functions. The speech system of a language is made specific by the items and their combinations which the language actually realizes from among those potentially realizable. This choice in turn is determined by the linguistic code. (The acquisition of the living language is the acquisition of knowledge of these peculiarities of speech production and also the articulatory skills, abilities and kinetic automatisms based on that knowledge.)

Concerning the acoustic stage of the speech chain, Hungarian phonetic manuals usually content themselves with a survey of the essentials of acoustics at the most or skip even those', although speech can be examined in a most exact manner in this non-somatic manifestation and it can be most easily and fully captured in its acoustic nature. The acoustics of speech, which started its development at the end of the last century and has grown to full proportions in the present century, now has a vast literature and has become the leading branch of phonetics.

The acoustic definition of speech runs as follows: it is a string of vibrations alternating with pauses in which the vibrations continually change their frequency, intensity and duration. Thus speech is a chain of air vibrations spreading in the form of sound waves and as such, it is a physical, phenomenon. Its basic unit, which corresponds to the kineme, js the acoustic formation called the acouseme, which is a definite vibration stereotype.

The phonetic investigation of the perceptual stage of speech is perhaps even more neglected by Hungarian phonetic studies than that of the acoustic stage. Here lingustic-pho- netic investigation is supplemented by knowledge gained from the fields of acoustics, psychology and physiology. The acoustic vibrations received by the hearing organs of man are turned into sounds through perception. At this stage the speech chain becomes “subjecti- vized” once more, inasmuch as vibration is sensed as sound and pitch, intensity as loudness and absolute duration as relative duration.

The closing stage of the speech chain is comprehension in the brain. As to its character it is a process of cellular biology. The stimuli reaching the brain through the nerve tracks bring about the cytobiological processes which result in linguistic decoding, i.e. in the linguistic interpretation of the nerve-impulses. Thus the speech chain starts with the operation of encoding which is determined by the linguistic system, then the speech signal passes through several transitions until in the last phase it is submitted to linguistic interpretation, comprehension or decoding, which corresponds to an inverted kind of encoding. The stimulus complexes becoming linguistically relevant elements, i.e. functional units, arranged in accordance with linguistic rules, and operating as factors of the mind, produce the comprehension of speech.

To sum up, we have come to the conclusion that the internal empirical branches of linguistic phonetics are the following:

1. encoding of speech ~ cortical phonetics

2. physiology of speech ~ articulatory phonetics

3. acoustics of speech ~ acoustic phonetics

4. perception of speech ~ auditory phonetics

5. comprehension of speech ~ cortical phonetics

So far we have characterized the stages of the speech chain. At each stage we have tried to define speech according to the character of the process which takes place there and we have also named the elementary speech units. We have started out from the general definition of speech as the form in which language functions, and from the generalization of partial units we have arrived at the concept of the speech sound.

Our conspectus examines Russian speech sounds as building-blocks of the speech chain in the articulatory and acoustic stages of the speech stream.

It follows from the nature of the present work that we have no opportunity to discuss suprasegmental phenomena. The division of the utterance into phonetic units (such as phrases, syntagms, etc.), the means and rules of forming their melodic, dynamic and rhythmic patterns, the use for communication of differences in voice quality and tempo, constitute a separate field of speech study, outside the scope of a sound conspectus.

The relation between the sound elements of speech and the “meaningful” units of language, the function of the former in distinguishing the shape of morphemes and words are examined by what is known as functional phonetics, i.e. phonology, and again, are outside the scope of a conspectus of speech sounds.