Allophonic Variation in English, Phoneme vs. Allophone

Phoneme vs. Allophone Unit 2 Prof. Moisés Ánton Bittner Phonetics and Phonology 2 Spring Term 2013 Phoneme: Historical Background  The term phonème (from the Greek: φώ η α, phōnēma, a sound uttered ) was reportedly first used by A. DufricheDesgenettes in 1873, but it referred only to a speech sound.  The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875–1895. 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 the phonemes of a language and listing each phoneme s allophones; 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. Phoneme /ˈfəʊ iː /  A phoneme is a basic unit of a language's phonology, which is combined with other phonemes to form meaningful units such as words or morphemes.  The phoneme can be described as “the smallest distinctive or contrastive linguistic unit in the sound system of a language which 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 the realisation of phonemes by individual speakers, and are referred to as phones [from Greek phone, 'voice']. The phone, then, is a concept used in phonetics.  Phonetic symbols which represent phonemes are enclosed in slashes, //. Strictly speaking, they are then phonemic* symbols, rather than phonetic symbols, but unfortunately this terminological distinction is not always observed. Phones, the true phonetic symbols, occur in square 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 unknown language. Each of the two contrasting sounds in such a minimal pair is a distinct phoneme.  Other fundamental concepts used in phonemic analysis of this sort are complementary distribution, free variation, distinctive feature and allophone. */fəˈniːmɪk/ Minimal Pairs  In establishing the set of phonemes of a language, it is usual to demonstrate the independent, contrastive nature of a phoneme by citing pairs of words which differ 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/ are separate, contrasting phonemes; the same cannot be done in, for example, Japanese since that language does not have distinct /r/ and /l/ phonemes. 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. 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 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 one-to-one correspondence. A phoneme might be represented by a combination of two or more letters (digraph, trigraph, etc.), like <sh> in English or <sch> in German (both representing phonemes /ʃ/). Allophone  In phonology, an allophone (/ˈæləfəʊn/; from the Greek: ἄ ος, állos, other and φω ή, phōnē, voice, sound ) is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds (or phones) used to pronounce a single phoneme.  For example, [pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language.  Although a phoneme's allophones are all alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable.  Changing the allophone used by native speakers for a given phoneme in a specific context usually will not change the meaning of a word but the result may sound non-native or unintelligible.  An allophone can therefore be defined as one realisation 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 phonetics because they are related to parole performance, and the term phoneme pertains phonology because it is related to langue competence. to or to or Allophone: Historical Background  The term allophone was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s. In doing so, he placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory.  The term was popularised by G. L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition. Phonotactics  It has often been observed that languages do not allow phonemes to appear in any order.  A native speaker of English can figure out fairly easily that the sequence of phonemes /streks/ makes an English word ('strengths'), that the sequence /bled/ would be acceptable as an English word 'blage' although that word does 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, the study of sound sequences. Parole vs. langue  In order to separate the two meanings of the word language the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) proposed the French terms:  Parole to refer to actual language use (i.e. to concrete utterances).  Langue for a speech community's shared knowledge of a language (i.e. for the language system). Performance vs. Competence  A similar dichotomy was put forward by the American linguist Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), who used the terms performance and competence to refer to largely the same concepts. Chomsky, however, put more emphasis on the individual nature of language.  Performance, then, is the actual language use of an individual speaker, and competence is that individual speaker's knowledge of the language.  Chomsky later replaced these terms with E(xternalised)- language and I(nternalised)-language, but the new terms are rarely used. 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 an Integrated Course in Phonetic Transcription. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone 8