Introduction

Phonetics deals with the study of the sounds used in the languages of the world. Its main goals are to catalog the existing sounds, to examine their acoustic properties, and to determine how they are produced and perceived by human beings. Thus, by its very nature, phonetics relates to a wide variety of disciplines: not only general linguistics, but also physics, biology (physiology and neurology), and psychology.

Our own perspective in this chapter will be relatively narrowly circumscribed. First, we shall confine ourselves to what is traditionally known as articulatory phonetics (‘la phonétique articulatoire’), that is, the study of sound production at the level of the vocal cords and the cavities above the vocal cords (the supraglottal cavities). We shall not consider, for instance, acoustic phonetics or sound perception. Second, rather than aiming for a comprehensive review of the articulation of all the sounds, or even all the sound types, that have been documented in natural languages, we shall for the most part focus only on the knowledge of articulatory phonetics that is required in order to tackle the sound systems of French and English and their contrastive study. In sum, this chapter is simply devoted to an overview of the operation of the speech organs and to a presentation of the main articulatory parameters which permit the description, classification, and comparison of French and English sounds.