Phoneme
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In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme (/ˈfoʊniːm/) is a set of phones that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most
Phonemes that are established by the use of minimal pairs, such as tap vs tab or pat vs bat, are written between slashes: /p/, /b/. To show pronunciation, linguists use
There are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic (or phonematic) terms. However, a phoneme is generally regarded as an
Notation
Phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in
The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the
Assignment of speech sounds to phonemes
A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, scat, skit. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects, the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in ⓘ [kʰɪt], the sound is aspirated, but in ⓘ [skɪl], it is unaspirated. The words, therefore, contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed [kʰ] for the aspirated form and [k] for the unaspirated one. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme, because if a speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using the aspirated form [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other sounds would cause a change in meaning if substituted: for example, substitution of the sound [t] would produce the different word still, and that sound must therefore be considered to represent a different phoneme (the phoneme /t/).
The above shows that in English, [k] and [kʰ] are
Minimal pairs
A pair of words like kátur and gátur (above) that differ only in one phone is called a minimal pair for the two alternative phones in question (in this case, [kʰ] and [k]). The existence of minimal pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme.
To take another example, the minimal pair tip and dip illustrates that in English, [t] and [d] belong to separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/; since the words have different meanings, English-speakers must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds.
Signed languages, such as
However, the absence of minimal pairs for a given pair of phones does not always mean that they belong to the same phoneme: they may be so dissimilar phonetically that it is unlikely for speakers to perceive them as the same sound. For example, English has no minimal pair for the sounds [h] (as in hat) and [ŋ] (as in bang), and the fact that they can be shown to be in complementary distribution could be used to argue for their being allophones of the same phoneme. However, they are so dissimilar phonetically that they are considered separate phonemes.[3]
Phonologists have sometimes had recourse to "near minimal pairs" to show that speakers of the language perceive two sounds as significantly different even if no exact minimal pair exists in the lexicon. It is challenging to find a minimal pair to distinguish English /ʃ/ from /ʒ/, yet it seems uncontroversial to claim that the two consonants are distinct phonemes. The two words 'pressure' /ˈprɛʃər/ and 'pleasure' /ˈplɛʒər/ can serve as a near minimal pair.[4] The reason why this is still acceptable proof of phonemehood is that there is nothing about the additional difference (/r/ vs. /l/) that can be expected to somehow condition a voicing difference for a single underlying postalveolar fricative. One can, however, find true minimal pairs for /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ if less common words are considered. For example, 'Confucian' and 'confusion' are a valid minimal pair.
Suprasegmental phonemes
Besides
Phonemic stress is encountered in languages such as English. For example, there are two words spelled invite, one is a verb and is stressed on the second syllable, the other is a noun and stressed on the first syllable (without changing any of the individual sounds). The position of the stress distinguishes the words and so a full phonemic specification would include indication of the position of the stress: /ɪnˈvaɪt/ for the verb, /ˈɪnvaɪt/ for the noun. In other languages, such as French, word stress cannot have this function (its position is generally predictable) and so it is not phonemic (and therefore not usually indicated in dictionaries).
Phonemic tones are found in languages such as Mandarin Chinese in which a given syllable can have five different tonal pronunciations:
Tone number | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Hanzi
|
媽 | 麻 | 馬 | 罵 | 嗎 |
Pinyin | mā | má | mǎ | mà | ma |
IPA | [má] | [mǎ] | [mà][a] | [mâ] | [ma] |
Gloss | mother | hemp | horse | scold | question particle |
The tone "phonemes" in such languages are sometimes called tonemes. Languages such as English do not have phonemic tone, but they use intonation for functions such as emphasis and attitude.
Distribution of allophones
When a phoneme has more than one allophone, the one actually heard at a given occurrence of that phoneme may be dependent on the phonetic environment (surrounding sounds). Allophones that normally cannot appear in the same environment are said to be in complementary distribution. In other cases, the choice of allophone may be dependent on the individual speaker or other unpredictable factors. Such allophones are said to be in free variation, but allophones are still selected in a specific phonetic context, not the other way around.
The term phonème (from
Later, it was used and redefined in
Some linguists (such as
In the description of some languages, the term
By analogy with the phoneme, linguists have proposed other sorts of underlying objects, giving them names with the suffix -eme, such as
Restrictions on occurrence
Languages do not generally allow words or syllables to be built of any arbitrary sequences of phonemes. There are phonotactic restrictions on which sequences of phonemes are possible and in which environments certain phonemes can occur. Phonemes that are significantly limited by such restrictions may be called restricted phonemes.
In English, examples of such restrictions include the following:
- /ŋ/, as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning (in many other languages, such as Māori, Swahili, Tagalog, Thai, and Setswana, /ŋ/ can appear word-initially).
- /h/ occurs only at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end (a few languages, such as Romanian, allow /h/ syllable-finally).
- In non-rhotic dialects, /ɹ/ can occur immediately only before a vowel, never before a consonant.
- /w/ and /j/ occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a syllable (except in interpretations in which a word like boy is analyzed as /bɔj/).
Some phonotactic restrictions can alternatively be analyzed as cases of neutralization. See Neutralization and archiphonemes below, particularly the example of the occurrence of the three English nasals before stops.
Biuniqueness
Biuniqueness is a requirement of classic
An example of the problems arising from the biuniqueness requirement is provided by the phenomenon of
For further discussion of such cases, see the next section.
Neutralization and archiphonemes
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Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they do not contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized. In these positions it may become less clear which phoneme a given phone represents. Absolute neutralization is a phenomenon in which a segment of the
An example of neutralization is provided by the Russian vowels /a/ and /o/. These phonemes are contrasting in stressed syllables, but in unstressed syllables the contrast is lost, since both are reduced to the same sound, usually [ə] (for details, see vowel reduction in Russian). In order to assign such an instance of [ə] to one of the phonemes /a/ and /o/, it is necessary to consider morphological factors (such as which of the vowels occurs in other forms of the words, or which inflectional pattern is followed). In some cases even this may not provide an unambiguous answer. A description using the approach of underspecification would not attempt to assign [ə] to a specific phoneme in some or all of these cases, although it might be assigned to an archiphoneme, written something like //A//, which reflects the two neutralized phonemes in this position, or {a|o}, reflecting its unmerged values.[b]
A somewhat different example is found in English, with the three
This latter type of analysis is often associated with
Another example from English, but this time involving complete phonetic convergence as in the Russian example, is the flapping of /t/ and /d/ in some American English (described above under Biuniqueness). Here the words betting and bedding might both be pronounced [ˈbɛɾɪŋ]. Under the generative grammar theory of linguistics, if a speaker applies such flapping consistently, morphological evidence (the pronunciation of the related forms bet and bed, for example) would reveal which phoneme the flap represents, once it is known which morpheme is being used.[17] However, other theorists would prefer not to make such a determination, and simply assign the flap in both cases to a single archiphoneme, written (for example) //D//.
Further mergers in English are plosives after /s/, where /p, t, k/ conflate with /b, d, ɡ/, as suggested by the alternative spellings sketti and sghetti. That is, there is no particular reason to transcribe spin as /ˈspɪn/ rather than as /ˈsbɪn/, other than its historical development, and it might be less ambiguously transcribed //ˈsBɪn//.
Morphophonemes
A morphophoneme is a theoretical unit at a deeper level of abstraction than traditional phonemes, and is taken to be a unit from which
Numbers of phonemes in different languages
All known languages use only a small subset of the many possible
The number of phonemically distinct
Some languages, such as French, have no phonemic tone or stress, while Cantonese and several of the Kam–Sui languages have six to nine tones (depending on how they are counted), and the Kam-Sui Dong language has nine to 15 tones by the same measure. One of the Kru languages, Wobé, has been claimed to have 14,[22] though this is disputed.[23]
The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/. The most common consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/.[24] Relatively few languages lack any of these consonants, although it does happen: for example, Arabic lacks /p/, standard Hawaiian lacks /t/, Mohawk and Tlingit lack /p/ and /m/, Hupa lacks both /p/ and a simple /k/, colloquial Samoan lacks /t/ and /n/, while Rotokas and Quileute lack /m/ and /n/.
The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions
During the development of phoneme theory in the mid-20th century, phonologists were concerned not only with the procedures and principles involved in producing a phonemic analysis of the sounds of a given language, but also with the reality or uniqueness of the phonemic solution. These were central concerns of
Different analyses of the English vowel system may be used to illustrate this. The article English phonology states that "English has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes" and that "there are 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14–16 in General American and 20–21 in Australian English". Although these figures are often quoted as fact, they actually reflect just one of many possible analyses, and later in the English Phonology article an alternative analysis is suggested in which some diphthongs and long vowels may be interpreted as comprising a short vowel linked to either /j/ or /w/. The fullest exposition of this approach is found in Trager and Smith (1951), where all long vowels and diphthongs ("complex nuclei") are made up of a short vowel combined with either /j/, /w/ or /h/ (plus /r/ for rhotic accents), each comprising two phonemes.[28] The transcription for the vowel normally transcribed /aɪ/ would instead be /aj/, /aʊ/ would be /aw/ and /ɑː/ would be /ah/, or /ar/ in a rhotic accent if there is an ⟨r⟩ in the spelling. It is also possible to treat English long vowels and diphthongs as combinations of two vowel phonemes, with long vowels treated as a sequence of two short vowels, so that 'palm' would be represented as /paam/. English can thus be said to have around seven vowel phonemes, or even six if schwa were treated as an allophone of /ʌ/ or of other short vowels.
In the same period there was disagreement about the correct basis for a phonemic analysis. The
These topics are discussed further in English phonology#Controversial issues.
Correspondence between letters and phonemes
Phonemes are considered to be the basis for alphabetic writing systems. In such systems the written symbols (graphemes) represent, in principle, the phonemes of the language being written. This is most obviously the case when the alphabet was invented with a particular language in mind; for example, the Latin alphabet was devised for Classical Latin, and therefore the Latin of that period enjoyed a near one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in most cases, though the devisers of the alphabet chose not to represent the phonemic effect of vowel length. However, because changes in the spoken language are often not accompanied by changes in the established orthography (as well as other reasons, including dialect differences, the effects of morphophonology on orthography, and the use of foreign spellings for some loanwords), the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in a given language may be highly distorted; this is the case with English, for example.
The correspondence between symbols and phonemes in alphabetic writing systems is not necessarily a
In sign languages
Sign language phonemes are bundles of articulation features. Stokoe was the first scholar to describe the phonemic system of ASL. He identified the bundles tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula), dez (the handshape, from designator), and sig (the motion, from signation). Some researchers also discern ori (orientation), facial expression or mouthing. Just as with spoken languages, when features are combined, they create phonemes. As in spoken languages, sign languages have minimal pairs which differ in only one phoneme. For instance, the ASL signs for father and mother differ minimally with respect to location while handshape and movement are identical; location is thus contrastive.
Stokoe's terminology and notation system are no longer used by researchers to describe the phonemes of sign languages; William Stokoe's research, while still considered seminal, has been found not to characterize American Sign Language or other sign languages sufficiently.[33] For instance, non-manual features are not included in Stokoe's classification. More sophisticated models of sign language phonology have since been proposed by Brentari,[34] Sandler,[35] and Van der Kooij.[36]
Chereme
Cherology and chereme (from
The terms were coined in 1960 by William Stokoe[38] at Gallaudet University to describe sign languages as true and full languages. Once a controversial idea, the position is now universally accepted in linguistics. Stokoe's terminology, however, has been largely abandoned.[39]
See also
- Alphabetic principle
- Alternation (linguistics)
- Complementary distribution
- Diaphoneme
- Diphone
- Emic and etic
- Free variation
- Initial-stress-derived noun
- International Phonetic Alphabet
- Minimal pair
- Morphophonology
- Phone
- Phonemic orthography
- Phonology
- Phonological change
- Phonotactics
- Sphoṭa
- Toneme
- Triphone
- Viseme
Notes
References
- ^ Wells 1982, p. 179.
- ^ Handspeak. "Minimal pairs in sign language phonology". handspeak.com. Archived from the original on 14 February 2017. Retrieved 13 February 2017.
- ^ Wells 1982, p. 44.
- ^ Wells 1982, p. 48.
- ^ Liddell, H.G. & Scott, R. (1940). A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones. with the assistance of. Roderick McKenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- ^ Jones 1957.
- ^ Jones, D. (1917), The phonetic structure of the Sechuana language, Transactions of the Philological Society 1917-20, pp. 99–106
- ^ a b Twaddell 1935.
- ^ Harris 1951.
- ^ a b Chomsky & Halle 1968.
- ^ Clark & Yallop 1995, chpt. 11.
- ^ Jakobson & Halle 1968.
- ^ Jakobson, Fant & Halle 1952.
- ^ Ladefoged 2006, pp. 268–276.
- ^ Pike 1967.
- ^ Kiparsky, P., Linguistic universals and linguistic change. In: E. Bach & R.T. Harms (eds.), Universals in linguistic theory, 1968, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston (pp. 170–202)
- S2CID 145227467.
- ^ Crystal 2010, p. 173.
- ISBN 9783110102574.
- ISBN 978-0-375-42502-8.
- ^ "UPSID Nr. of segments". www.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de. Retrieved 22 January 2022.
- ^ Bearth, Thomas; Link, Christa (1980). "The tone puzzle of Wobe". Studies in African Linguistics. 11 (2): 147–207. Archived from the original on 24 February 2021. Retrieved 5 January 2019.
- S2CID 170335215.
- ^ Moran, Steven; McCloy, Daniel; Wright, Richard, eds. (2014). "PHOIBLE Online". Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved 5 January 2019.
- ^ Pike, K.L. (1947) Phonemics, University of Michigan Press, p. 64
- ^ Chao, Yuen Ren (1934). "The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems". Academia Sinica. IV.4: 363–97.
- doi:10.1086/464181.
- ^ Trager, G.; Smith, H. (1951). An Outline of English Structure. American Council of Learned Societies. p. 20. Retrieved 30 December 2017.
- ^ Bloomfield, Leonard (1933). Language. Henry Holt.
- ^ Harris 1951, p. 5.
- JSTOR 409004.
- ^ Chomsky, Noam (1964). Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Mouton.
- OCLC 57352333.
- ^ Brentari, Diane (1998). A prosodic model of sign language phonology. MIT Press.
- ^ Sandler, Wendy (1989). Phonological representation of the sign: linearity and nonlinearity in American Sign Language. Foris.
- ^ Kooij, Els van der (2002). Phonological categories in Sign Language of the Netherlands. The role of phonetic implementation and iconicity. PhD dissertation, Leiden University.
- ^ Bross, Fabian. 2015. "Chereme", in In: Hall, T. A. Pompino-Marschall, B. (ed.): Dictionaries of Linguistics and Communication Science (Wörterbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, WSK). Volume: Phonetics and Phonology. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- ^ Stokoe, William C. (1960). "Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf" (PDF). Studies in linguistics: Occasional papers (No. 8). Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Buffalo. Archived from the original (PDF) on 23 November 2021 – via Save Our Deaf Schools.
- ^ Seegmiller, 2006. "Stokoe, William (1919–2000)", in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed.
Further reading
- OCLC 317361
- Clark, J.; Yallop, C. (1995), An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology (2nd ed.), Blackwell, ISBN 978-0-631-19452-1
- ISBN 978-0-521-55967-6
- Crystal, David (2010), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (3rd ed.), Cambridge, ISBN 978-0-521-73650-3
- Gimson, A.C. (2008), Cruttenden, A. (ed.), The Pronunciation of English (7th ed.), Hodder, ISBN 978-0-340-95877-3
- Harris, Z. (1951), Methods in Structural Linguistics, Chicago University Press, OCLC 2232282
- Jakobson, R.; Fant, G.; Halle, M. (1952), Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, MIT, OCLC 6492928
- Jakobson, R.; Halle, M. (1968), Phonology in Relation to Phonetics, in Malmberg, B. (ed) Manual of Phonetics, North-Holland, OCLC 13223685
- Jones, Daniel (1957), "The History and Meaning of the Term 'Phoneme'", Le Maître Phonétique, 35 (72), Le Maître Phonétique, supplement (reprinted in E. Fudge (ed) Phonology, Penguin): 1–20, OCLC 4550377
- Ladefoged, P. (2006), A Course in Phonetics (5th ed.), Thomson, ISBN 978-1-4282-3126-9
- Pike, K.L. (1967), Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior, Mouton, OCLC 308042
- Swadesh, M. (1934), "The Phonemic Principle", Language, 10 (2): 117–129, JSTOR 409603
- Twaddell, W.F. (March 1935). "On Defining the Phoneme". Language. 11 (1). Linguistic Society of America: 5–62. JSTOR 522070. (reprinted in Joos, M. Readings in Linguistics, 1957)
- Wells, J.C. (1982), Accents of English, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-29719-2