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What is the difference between a phonetician and a phonologist? I've seen these two terms somewhere on this site but can't figure out the difference.

Jack Maddington
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The difference resides in the subject matter that they investigate. They have in common the fact that they investigate language sound systems. Phonology specifically looks at sound from the perspective of computations involving discrete units (including sets of individual units), such as [p] or [p,b,m], and phonetics involves the mapping between symbolic sound and physical sound. So while phonology would describe [p] as e.g. a "bilabial voiceless stop" or [+anterior,-coronal,-voice] depending on your theoretical framework, phonetics would describe the sound in terms of a particular pattern of duration in milliseconds, formant transitions, amplitudes, as well as articulatory movements; also, phonetics would study how incoming continuous sound waves are interpreted as discrete sounds.

There is a high degree of interdependency between these disciplines, so a phonological analysis is based on prior phonetic work that allows us to make a rough mapping between continuous sound and individual segments like [p]. Likewise, a phonetic analysis generally looks at properties of classes of discrete sounds, for example the way that formant transitions differ between [p,b,m] versus [t,d,n], where you need a prior phonological analysis of a language to decide that a certain part of the speech stream is a "p" or a "t".

user6726
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  • It is obvious to human speakers of English whether a sound is a "p" or a "t"; it doesn't "need a prior phonological analysis". – Greg Lee Dec 12 '15 at 20:24
  • Presumably those people are doing their own intuitive phonological analysis. – Jeremy Needle Dec 12 '15 at 20:52
  • Speakers of English already did their rough phonetic analysis when they were babies. – user6726 Dec 12 '15 at 20:53
  • I don't think it's useful to describe phonetics as investigating 'language sound systems'. Phonetics investigates human speech sounds without reference to the system in a particular language. And in working on a previously-undescribed language phonological analysis is often prior to phonetic work as you need to establish the contrasts before investigating the precise acoustic nature of the segments (altho they typically proceed hand-in-hand). – Gaston Ümlaut Dec 13 '15 at 08:04
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    I have to completely disagree, indeed it is phoneticians who first introduced the phrase "language sound systems" into contemporary P research. Observe the research of Ladefoged, Maddieson, Cohn, Keating and Ohala as examples. Perhaps you are thinking of "speech and hearing scientist". – user6726 Dec 13 '15 at 16:21
  • @user6726 "So while phonology would describe [p] as e.g. a "bilabial voiceless stop" Are you saying that it is theoretically incorrect to describe b as a bilabial voiceless stop in phonetic research (e.g. articulatory phonetics)? – Alex B. Dec 14 '15 at 00:01
  • No, not at all. – user6726 Dec 14 '15 at 01:34
  • @GastonÜmlaut, I'm with user6726 on this one. It's rarely useful for a linguist (whether she calls herself a phonetician or a phonologist) to do phonetics without reference to the sound system of a language. In fact, the only time I can think of when it is useful to do so is in the context of field work on a new language, in which case the order of operations can be the reverse of what you describe: 1) Make recordings and perform phonetic measurements; 2) Formulate phonological hypotheses based on phonetic measurements. – musicallinguist Dec 14 '15 at 21:57
  • @musicallinguist I agree with your first point, I used clumsy wording (in my head it was clear!) what I wanted to say is that phonetics is not about investigating individual language sound systems. As for your second point, I guess what you say would be a possible approach but I've never heard of it being done that way. Usually with a new language one looks for contrasts that elucidate the phonemes and after the contrasts are reasonably well established their phonetics may be examined. – Gaston Ümlaut Dec 15 '15 at 21:03
  • @GastonÜmlaut Sure, that's how it usually proceeds in fieldwork. But I think there can be cases in which you record a bunch of data before knowing what all of the relevant contrasts are and use phonetic tools to guide you towards figuring out what they are--especially when the language employs features completely unfamiliar (and thus difficult to perceive aurally) to you, the investigator. I also think the process can be cyclical--make phonological hypotheses, test them by examining the phonetics, use phonetic results to revise and fine-tune the phonological model, test the new model, etc. – musicallinguist Dec 16 '15 at 03:05