Product Code Database
A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes (or the spatial-gestural equivalent in ), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes; phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology.
Sounds that are perceived as phonemes vary by languages and dialects, so that and are separate phonemes in English since they distinguish words like sin from sing ( versus ), yet they comprise a single phoneme in some other languages, such as Spanish, in which and for instance are merely interpreted by Spanish speakers as regional or dialect-specific ways of pronouncing the same word ( pan: the Spanish word for "bread"). Such spoken variations of a single phoneme are known by linguists as . Linguists use slashes in the IPA to transcribe phonemes but square brackets to transcribe more precise pronunciation details, including allophones; they describe this basic distinction as phonemic versus phonetic. Thus, the pronunciation patterns of tap versus tab, or pat versus bat, can be represented phonemically and are written between slashes (including , , etc.), while nuances of exactly how a speaker pronounces are phonetic and written between brackets, like for the p in spit versus for the p in pit, which in English is an aspirated allophone of /p/ (i.e., pronounced with an extra burst of air).
There are many views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. Generally, a phoneme is regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of spoken sound variations that are nevertheless perceived as a single basic unit of sound by the ordinary native speakers of a given language. While phonemes are considered an abstract underlying representation for sound segments within words, the corresponding phonetic realizations of those phonemes—each phoneme with its various allophones—constitute the surface form that is actually uttered and heard. Allophones each have technically different articulations inside particular words or particular environments within words, yet these differences do not create any semantics distinctions. Alternatively, at least one of those articulations could be feasibly used in all such words with these words still being recognized as such by users of the language. An example in American English is that the sound spelled with the symbol t is usually articulated with a glottal stop (or a similar glottalized sound) in the word cat, an alveolar flap in dating, an alveolar plosive in stick, and an aspirated alveolar plosive in tie; however, American speakers perceive or "hear" all of these sounds (usually with no conscious effort) as merely being allophones of a single phoneme: the one traditionally represented in the IPA as .
For computer-typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA exist to represent IPA symbols using only ASCII characters. However, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. For languages whose writing systems employ the phonemic principle, ordinary letters may be used to denote phonemes, although this approach is often imperfect, as pronunciations naturally shift in a language over time, rendering previous spelling systems outdated or no longer closely representative of the sounds of the language (see below).
The above shows that in English, and are allophones of a single phoneme . In some languages, however, and are perceived by native speakers as significantly different sounds, and substituting one for the other can change the meaning of a word. In those languages, therefore, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example, in Icelandic, is the first sound of , meaning "cheerful", but is the first sound of , meaning "riddles". Icelandic, therefore, has two separate phonemes and .
To take another example, the minimal pair t ip and dip illustrates that in English, and belong to separate phonemes, and ; since the words have different meanings, English-speakers must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds.
Signed languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), also have minimal pairs, differing only in (exactly) one of the signs' parameters: handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and nonmanual signal or marker. A minimal pair may exist in the signed language if the basic sign stays the same, but one of the parameters changes.
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 (as in h at ) and (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. A case like this shows that sometimes it is the systemic distinctions and not the lexical context which are decisive in establishing phonemes. This implies that the phoneme should be defined as the smallest phonological unit which is contrastive at a lexical level or distinctive at a systemic level.
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 from , yet it seems uncontroversial to claim that the two consonants are distinct phonemes. The two words 'pressure' and 'pleasure' can serve as a near minimal pair. 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, 'Confucianism' and 'confusion' are a valid minimal pair.
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: for the verb, for the noun. In other languages, such as French language, 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:
| + Minimal set for phonemic tone in Mandarin Chinese ! scope="row" | Tone number | 5 |
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.
Later, it was used and redefined in generative linguistics, most famously by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, and remains central to many accounts of the development of modern phonology. As a theoretical concept or model, though, it has been supplemented and even replaced by others.
Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle) proposed that phonemes may be further decomposable into features, such features being the true minimal constituents of language. Features overlap each other in time, as do suprasegmental phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages. Features could be characterized in different ways: Jakobson and colleagues defined them in acoustic terms, Chomsky and Halle used a predominantly articulatory basis, though retaining some acoustic features, while Peter Ladefoged's system is a purely articulatory system apart from the use of the acoustic term 'sibilant'.
In the description of some languages, the term chroneme has been used to indicate contrastive length or duration of phonemes. In languages in which tones are phonemic, the tone phonemes may be called . Though not all scholars working on such languages use these terms, they are by no means obsolete.
By analogy with the phoneme, linguists have proposed other sorts of underlying objects, giving them names with the suffix -eme, such as morpheme and grapheme. These are sometimes called . The latter term was first used by Kenneth Pike, who also generalized the concepts of emic unit description (from phonemic and phonetic respectively) to applications outside linguistics.
In English, examples of such restrictions include the following:
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.
An example of the problems arising from the biuniqueness requirement is provided by the phenomenon of flapping in North American English. This may cause either or (in the appropriate environments) to be realized with the phone (an alveolar flap). For example, the same flap sound may be heard in the words hi tting and bi dding, although it is intended to realize the phoneme in the first word and in the second. This appears to contradict biuniqueness.
For further discussion of such cases, see the next section.
An example of neutralization is provided by the Russian vowels and . These phonemes are contrasting in stressed syllables, but in unstressed syllables the contrast is lost, since both are vowel reduction to the same sound, usually (for details, see vowel reduction in Russian). In order to assign such an instance of to one of the phonemes and , it is necessary to consider morphological factors (such as which of the vowels occurs in other forms of the words, or which 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 to a specific phoneme in some or all of these cases, although it might be assigned to an archiphoneme, written something like , which reflects the two neutralized phonemes in this position, or , reflecting its unmerged values.
A somewhat different example is found in English, with the three nasal consonant phonemes . In word-final position these all contrast, as shown by the minimal triplet sum , sun , sung . However, before a stop consonant such as (provided there is no morpheme boundary between them), only one of the nasals is possible in any given position: before , before or , and before , as in limp, lint, link (, , ). The nasals are therefore not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists this makes it inappropriate to assign the nasal phones heard here to any one of the phonemes (even though, in this case, the phonetic evidence is unambiguous). Instead they may analyze these phonemes as belonging to a single archiphoneme, written something like , and state the underlying representations of limp, lint, link to be , , .
This latter type of analysis is often associated with Nikolai Trubetzkoy of the Prague school. Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter within double virgules or pipes, as with the examples and given above. Other ways the second of these has been notated include , and .
Another example from English, but this time involving complete phonetic convergence as in the Russian example, is the flapping of and in some American English (described above under Biuniqueness). Here the words betting and bedding might both be pronounced . 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. 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) .
Further mergers in English are after , where conflate with , as suggested by the alternative spellings and sghetti. That is, there is no particular reason to transcribe spin as rather than as , other than its historical development, and it might be less ambiguously transcribed .
The number of phonemically distinct can be as low as two, as in Ubykh language and Arrernte. At the other extreme, the Bantu languages language Ngwe language has 14 vowel qualities, 12 of which may occur long or short, making 26 oral vowels, plus six nasalized vowels, long and short, making a total of 38 vowels; while !Xóõ achieves 31 pure vowels, not counting its additional variation by vowel length, by varying the phonation. As regards consonant phonemes, Puinave language and the Papuan language Tauade language each have just seven, and Rotokas language has only six. !Xóõ, on the other hand, has somewhere around 77, and Ubykh phonology 81. The English language uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowel phonemes, including diphthongs, although its 22 to 26 consonants are close to average. Across all languages, the average number of consonant phonemes per language is about 22, while the average number of vowel phonemes is about 8.
Some languages, such as French language, 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 Kam language has nine to 15 tones by the same measure. One of the Kru languages, Wobé, has been claimed to have 14, though this is disputed.
The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels . The most common consonants are . Relatively few languages lack any of these consonants, although it does happen: for example, Arabic lacks , standard Hawaiian lacks , Mohawk language and Tlingit language lack and , Hupa language lacks both and a simple , colloquial Samoan language lacks and , while Rotokas language and Quileute lack and .
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 or . 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 , or (plus for rhotic accents), each comprising two phonemes. The transcription for the vowel normally transcribed would instead be , would be and would be , or /ar/ in a rhotic accent if there is an 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 or of other short vowels.
In the same period there was disagreement about the correct basis for a phonemic analysis. The structuralist position was that the analysis should be made purely on the basis of the sound elements and their distribution, with no reference to extraneous factors such as grammar, morphology or the intuitions of the native speaker; this position is strongly associated with Leonard Bloomfield. Zellig Harris claimed that it is possible to discover the phonemes of a language purely by examining the distribution of phonetic segments. Referring to mentalistic definitions of the phoneme, Twaddell (1935) stated "Such a definition is invalid because (1) we have no right to guess about the linguistic workings of an inaccessible 'mind', and (2) we can secure no advantage from such guesses. The linguistic processes of the 'mind' as such are quite simply unobservable; and introspection about linguistic processes is notoriously a fire in a wooden stove." This approach was opposed to that of Edward Sapir, who gave an important role to native speakers' intuitions about where a particular sound or group of sounds fitted into a pattern. Using English as an example, Sapir argued that, despite the superficial appearance that this sound belongs to a group of three nasal consonant phonemes (/m/, /n/ and /ŋ/), native speakers feel that the velar nasal is really the sequence ŋɡ/. The theory of generative phonology which emerged in the 1960s explicitly rejected the structuralist approach to phonology and favoured the mentalistic or cognitive view of Sapir.
These topics are discussed further in English phonology#Controversial issues.
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, ), like in English or in German language (both representing the phoneme ). Also a single letter may represent two phonemes, as in English representing or . There may also exist spelling/pronunciation rules (such as those for the pronunciation of in Italian language) that further complicate the correspondence of letters to phonemes, although they need not affect the ability to predict the pronunciation from the spelling and vice versa, provided the rules are consistent.
Stokoe notation 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. (2025). 9781563680977, Gallaudet University Press. ISBN 9781563680977 For instance, non-manual features are not included in Stokoe's classification. More sophisticated models of sign language phonology have since been proposed by Diane Brentari,Brentari, Diane (1998). A prosodic model of sign language phonology. MIT Press. Wendy Sandler,Sandler, Wendy (1989). Phonological representation of the sign: linearity and nonlinearity in American Sign Language. Foris. and Van der Kooij.Kooij, Els van der (2002). Phonological categories in Sign Language of the Netherlands. The role of phonetic implementation and iconicity. PhD dissertation, Leiden University.
The terms were coined in 1960 by William Stokoe 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.Seegmiller, 2006. "Stokoe, William (1919–2000)", in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed.
|
|
