WHAT IS A PHONEME
| Definition | |
| | A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. |
| Discussion | |
| | Phonologists have differing views of the phoneme. Following are the two major views considered here: |
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| Examples (English): Minimal pair | |
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| | The phones [r] and [l] contrast in identical environments and are considered to be separate phonemes. The phonemes /r/ and /l/ serve to distinguish the word rip from the word lip. |
| Examples (English): Distinctive features | |
| | Here are examples of the English phonemes /p/ and /i/ specified as sets of distinctive features: |
| | /p/ /i/ |
| | -syllabic +consonantal -sonorant +anterior -coronal -voice -continuant -nasal+syllabic -consonantal +sonorant +high -low -back -round +ATR -nasal |
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Phoneme Explanation
A phoneme is a basic element of a given language or dialect, from which words in that language or dialect are analyzed as being built up. The phoneme is defined by the International Phonetic Association as "the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances".[1]Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. However a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech sounds (phones) which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the "k" sounds in the words kit and skill are not identical (as described below), but they are perceived as the same sound by speakers of the language, and are therefore both considered to represent a single phoneme, /k/. Different speech sounds representing the same phoneme are known as allophones. Thus phonemes are often considered to provide an underlying representation for words, while speech sounds make up the corresponding surface form.
The study of systems of phonemes is a major component of the branch of linguistics called phonology.
Notation
Phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in transcription, whereas speech sounds (phones) are placed between square brackets. Thus /pʊʃ/ represents a sequence of three phonemes /p/, /ʊ/, /ʃ/ (the word push in standard English), while [pʰʊʃ] represents the phonetic sequence of sounds [pʰ] (aspirated "p"), [ʊ], [ʃ] (the usual pronunciation of push).(Another similar convention is the use of angle brackets to enclose the units of orthography, namely graphemes; for example, ⟨f⟩ represents the written letter (grapheme) f.)
The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the same set of symbols that are most commonly used for phones. (For computer typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum exist to represent IPA symbols in plain text.) 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 hampered by the complexity of the relationship between orthography and pronunciation (see Correspondence between letters and phonemes below).Assignment of speech sounds to phonemes
A simplified procedure for determining whether two sounds represent the same or different 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, school, skill. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in cat and kit the sound is aspirated, while in school and skill it is unaspirated (listen to U.S. pronunciations of 
kit (help·info) and skill (help·info)). The words therefore contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed [kʰ] for the aspirated form, [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 allophones of a single phoneme /k/. In some languages, however, [kʰ] and [k] are perceived by native speakers as different sounds, and substituting one for the other can change the meaning of a word; this means that in those languages, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example, in Icelandic, [kʰ] is the first sound of kátur meaning "cheerful", while [k] is the first sound of gátur meaning "riddles". Icelandic therefore has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/.
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 these two words have different meanings, English speakers must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds. In other languages, though, including Korean, even though both sounds [t] and [d] occur, no such minimal pairs exist. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing [t] and [d] in Korean provides evidence that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/. (The word /tata/ is pronounced [tada], for example. That is, when they hear this word, Korean speakers perceive the same sound in both the beginning and middle of the word, whereas an English speaker would perceive different sounds in these two locations.)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 too dissimilar phonetically for it to be conceivable that speakers perceive them as the same sound; for example, English has no minimal pairs for the sounds [h] (as in hat) and [ŋ] (as in bang), but they are so dissimilar that they are considered separate phonemes. There may also be "near minimal pairs" or other data which show that speakers of the language perceive two sounds as significantly different even if no exact minimal pairs exist in the lexicon.
Other features with phonemic status
While phonemes are normally conceived of as abstractions of discrete segmental speech sounds (vowels and consonants), there are other features of pronunciation – principally tone and stress – which in some languages can change the meaning of words in the way that phoneme contrasts do, and are consequently called phonemic features of those languages.Phonemic stress is encountered in languages such as English. For example, the word invite stressed on the second syllable is a verb, but when stressed on the first syllable (without changing any of the individual sounds) it becomes a noun. The position of the stress in the word affects the meaning, and therefore a full phonemic specification (providing enough detail to enable the word to be pronounced unambiguously) 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 is therefore not phonemic (and is 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. For example, mā (high level pitch) means "mom", má (rising pitch) means "hemp", mǎ (falling then rising) means "horse", mà (falling) means "scold", and ma (neutral tone) is an interrogative particle. The tone "phonemes" in such languages are sometimes called tonemes. Languages such as English do not have phonemic tone, although 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 which 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.Background and related ideas
The term phonème (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound 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 the Polish linguist Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875–1895. The term used by these two was fonema, the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics. The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi and others of the Prague School (during the years 1926–1935), and in those of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield. Some structuralists wished to eliminate a cognitive or psycholinguistic function for the phoneme.[citation needed]Later, it was also used 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, Morris Halle, and Noam Chomsky) consider phonemes to 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 designated as acoustic (Jakobson) or articulatory (Halle & Chomsky) in nature.
In some languages, the term chroneme may be used for contrastive length or duration of phonemes. In languages in which tones are phonemic, the tone phonemes may be called tonemes. Not all scholars working on such languages use these terms.
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 emic units. The latter term was first used by Kenneth Pike, who also generalized the concepts of emic and etic description (from phonemic and phonetic respectively) to applications outside linguistics.
Restrictions on occurrence
Main article: Phonotactics
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. Examples of such restrictions in English include:- /ŋ/, as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning (in many other languages, such as Swahili or Thai, /ŋ/ can appear word-initially).
- /h/ occurs only before vowels and at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end (a few languages, such as Arabic, or Romanian allow /h/ syllable-finally).
- In many American dialects with the cot–caught merger, /ɔ/ occurs only before /r/ and /l/ (and in the diphthong [ɔɪ] if this is not interpreted as a single phoneme).
- In non-rhotic dialects, /r/ can only occur before a vowel, never at the end of a word or before a consonant.
- /w/ and /j/ occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a syllable (except in interpretations where a word like boy is analyzed as /bɔj/).
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