Make
sure you can answer these questions – they may turn up in a quiz!
In addition to Chapter 1 of Ladefoged, you can
get some help from a site of the University College London. UCL offers an abundance
of online phonetics resources, many of which we will draw on in this course.
Go to this site for a concise introduction to the various fields of linguistics
and how phonetics fits into the big picture, along with lots of useful links:
http://www.speechandhearing.net/entrance/introduction.php#Linguistics
For comparison, here is another take on what linguistics
(including phonetics) is all about, along with some useful links, by Elizabeth
Pyatt:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/e/j/ejp10/lingland/faqling.html
Links to lots more linguistics resources here.
After you get through these pages, you can take
a short break, then move on to other pages in this section, starting with: