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Juncture, in linguistics, is the manner of moving (transition) between two successive in speech. An important type of juncture is the suprasegmental phoneme cue by means of which a listener can distinguish between two otherwise identical sequences of sounds that have different meanings.
Other less common typologies exist, such as the division (favoured by American Structuralist linguists in the middle twentieth century) into plus, single bar, double bar, and double cross junctures, denoted , , , and respectively. These correspond to syllabification and differences in intonation, single bar being a level pitch before a break, double bar being an upturn in pitch and a break, and double cross being a downturn in pitch that usually comes at the end of an utterance.
A word boundary preceded or followed by a syllable break is called an external open juncture. If there is no break, so that words on either side of the juncture are run together, the boundary is called an internal open juncture.
The distinction between open and close juncture is the difference between " ", with the open juncture between and , and "", with close juncture between and . In some varieties of English, only the latter involves an affricate.
The Two Ronnies comedy sketch "Four Candles" is entirely built around same-sounding words and phrases, including a taciturn customer's request for "fork handles" being misheard as "four candles".
In the world of word games, same-sounding phrases are sometimes also referred to as "oronyms". Such use of that term was first proposed by Gyles Brandreth in his book The Joy of Lex (1980). Since the term oronym was already well established in linguistics as an onomastic designation for a class of toponymic features (names of mountains, hills, etc.), the proposed alternative use of the same term was not universally accepted in scholarly literature.
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