ABSTRACT
Phonetics and phonology are both branches of linguistics that study the sounds of human languages. A phoneme may sound different depending on the context, and the concrete phonetic realizations of a phoneme are called allophones of this phoneme. Like phonemes, however, a morpheme is also an abstract representation in the speaker's mind, and its actual phonetic realizations, or allomorphs, depend on phonological contexts. Allophones are context-dependent, so that the phonological environments in which they occur do not overlap with each other. Phonemes are abstract sound categories in the speaker’s mind that contrast with each other in a given language. Phonetics treats speech sounds as concrete and physical elements that have stable inherent qualities. However, it is important to understand that speech sounds do not function as isolated entities in fulfilling their linguistic roles. In investigating the regularities and patterns in sound distribution, phonology views speech sounds as abstract linguistic units.
