Allophonic Variation in English Phoneme

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Unit 2Phoneme vs. Allophone

Prof. Moisés Ánton Bittner

Phonetics and Phonology 2Spring Term 2013


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The term phonème (from the Greek: φώνημα , phōnēma , ‘asound uttered’) was reportedly first used by A. Dufriche-Desgenettes in 1873, but it referred only to a speech sound.

The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by thePolish linguist Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay andhis student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875–1895.

Phoneme: Historical Background


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Phonemics When the importance of the phoneme became widely accepted, in the 1930's and 40's, many attempts were

made to develop scientific ways of establishing thephonemes of a language and listing each phoneme’sallophones; this was known as phonemics .

Nowadays, little importance is given to this type of analysis, and it is considered a minor branch of phonology, except for the practical purpose of devising writing systems for previously unwritten languages.


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Phoneme / ˈfəʊniːm / A phoneme is a basic unit of a language's phonology , which iscombined with other phonemes to form meaningful units suchas words or morphemes.

The phoneme can be described as “the smallest distinctive or contrastive linguistic unit in the sound system of a languagewhich may bring about a change of meaning ".

It is important to remember that phonemes are abstract,idealised sounds that are never pronounced and never heard. Actual, concrete speech sounds can be regarded as therealisation of phonemes by individual speakers, and are referredto as phones [from Greek phone, 'voice']. The phone, then, is aconcept used in phonetics .


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Phonetic symbols which represent phonemes are enclosed in slashes,

//. Strictly speaking, they are then phonemic* symbols , rather thanphonetic symbols, but unfortunately this terminological distinction isnot always observed. Phones , the true phonetic symbols, occur insquare brackets, [ ].

If we want to establish what phonemes there are in a sound system,

also called a phonemic system or phoneme inventory , we need to find pairs of words that differ in meaning and in only-one sound.

Linguists do this, for example, when they record a previously unknownlanguage. Each of the two contrasting sounds in such a minimal pairis a distinct phoneme.

Other fundamental concepts used in phonemic analysis of this sort arecomplementary distribution , free variation , distinctive featureand allophone .

*/f əˈniːmɪk/


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Minimal Pairs In establishing the set of phonemes of a language, it isusual to demonstrate the independent, contrastivenature of a phoneme by citing pairs of words whichdiffer in one sound only and have different meanings.

Thus in BBC English 'fairy' /fe ri / and 'fairly' /fe li /

make a minimal pair and prove that /r/ and /l/ areseparate, contrasting phonemes; the same cannot bedone in, for example, Japanese since that languagedoes not have distinct /r/ and /l/ phonemes.


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Correspondence between letters and

phonemes Phonemes are considered to be the basis for alphabetic writingsystems. In such systems the written symbols ( graphemes ) represent, inprinciple, the phonemes of the language being written. However,because changes in the spoken language are often not accompanied by changes in the established orthography.

The correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in a givenlanguage may be highly distorted; this is the case with English, forexample.

The correspondence between symbols and phonemes in alphabetic writing systems is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence. A phoneme might be represented by a combination of two or more letters(digraph, trigraph, etc.), like in English or in German (bothrepresenting phonemes / ʃ /).


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Allophone In phonology, an allophone (/ ˈæləf əʊn/; from the Greek: ἄλλος , állos,‘other’ and φωνή , phōnē , ‘voice, sound’) is one of a set of multiplepossible spoken sounds (or phones ) used to pronounce asingle phoneme.

For example, [ph] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for thephoneme /p/ in the English language.

Although a phoneme's allophones are all alternative pronunciationsfor a phoneme, the specific allophone selected in a given situation isoften predictable.

Changing the allophone used by native speakers for a given phonemein a specific context usually will not change the meaning of a word butthe result may sound non-native or unintelligible.


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An allophone can therefore be defined as onerealisation of a phoneme among others. Like phones,allophones are enclosed within square brackets, [ ],because they represent a concrete utterance.

The terms phone and allophone , then, pertain tophonetics because they are related to parole or

performance , and the term phoneme pertains tophonology because it is related to langue or competence .


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Allophone: Historical Background The term ‘allophone’ was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s. In doing so, he placed acornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory.

The term was popularised by G. L. Trager and BernardBloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and wenton to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition.


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Phonotactics It has often been observed that languages do not allowphonemes to appear in any order.

A native speaker of English can figure out fairly easily thatthe sequence of phonemes /stre k s / makes an English word ('strengths'), that the sequence /ble d / would beacceptable as an English word 'blage' although that worddoes not happen to exist, and that the sequence /lv zg /could not possibly be an English word.

Knowledge of such facts is important in phonotactics , thestudy of sound sequences.


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Parole vs. langue In order to separate the two meanings of the wordlanguage the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure(1857-1913) proposed the French terms:

Parole to refer to actual language use (i.e. to concreteutterances ).

Langue for a speech community's shared knowledgeof a language (i.e. for the language system ).


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Performance vs. Competence A similar dichotomy was put forward by the Americanlinguist Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), who used the termsperformance and competence to refer to largely the sameconcepts. Chomsky, however, put more emphasis on theindividual nature of language.

Performance , then, is the actual language use of anindividual speaker, and competence is that individualspeaker's knowledge of the language.

Chomsky later replaced these terms with E(xternalised)-language and I(nternalised)-language , but the new termsare rarely used.


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References Roach, Peter. 2002. Little Encyclopaedia of Phonetics .http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~llsroach/peter/

Skandera, Paul & Burleigh, Peter. 2005. A Manual of English Phonetics and Phonology - Twelve Lessons with anIntegrated Course in Phonetic Transcription . Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone

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Allophonic Variation in English Phoneme

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