pronounced as /notice/
A phoneme is any set of similar speech sounds that is perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound - a smallest possible phonetic unit - that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contains phonemes (or the spatial-gestural equivalent in sign languages), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology.
The English words cell and set have the exact same sequence of sounds, except for being different in their final consonant sounds: thus, pronounced as //sɛl// versus pronounced as //sɛt// in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a writing system that can be used to represent phonemes. Since pronounced as //l// and pronounced as //t// alone distinguish certain words from others, they are each examples of phonemes of the English language. Specifically they are consonant phonemes, along with pronounced as //s//, while pronounced as //ɛ// is a vowel phoneme. The spelling of English does not strictly conform to its phonemes, so that the words knot, nut, and gnat, regardless of spelling, all share the consonant phonemes pronounced as //n// and pronounced as //t//, differing only by their internal vowel phonemes: pronounced as //ɒ//, pronounced as //ʌ//, and pronounced as //æ//, respectively. Similarly, pronounced as //pʊʃt// is the notation for a sequence of four phonemes, pronounced as //p//, pronounced as //ʊ//, pronounced as //ʃ//, and pronounced as //t//, that together constitute the word pushed.
Sounds that are perceived as phonemes vary by languages and dialects, so that pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/ are separate phonemes in English since they distinguish words like sin from sing (pronounced as //sɪn// versus pronounced as //sɪŋ//), yet they comprise a single phoneme in some other languages, such as Spanish, in which pronounced as /[pan]/ and pronounced as /[paŋ]/ 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 allophones. 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 pronounced as //p//, pronounced as //b//, etc.), while nuances of exactly how a speaker pronounces pronounced as //p// are phonetic and written between brackets, like pronounced as /[p]/ for the p in spit versus pronounced as /[pʰ]/ 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 meaningful 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 pronounced as /[ʔ]/ (or a similar glottalized sound) in the word cat, an alveolar flap pronounced as /[ɾ]/ in dating, an alveolar plosive pronounced as /[t]/ in stick, and an aspirated alveolar plosive pronounced as /[tʰ]/ 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 pronounced as //t//.
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).
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 pronounced as //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 pronounced as /kʰɪt/, the sound is aspirated, but in pronounced as /skɪl/, it is unaspirated. The words, therefore, contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed pronounced as /[kʰ]/ for the aspirated form and pronounced as /[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 pronounced as /[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 pronounced as /[t]/ would produce the different word still, and that sound must therefore be considered to represent a different phoneme (the phoneme pronounced as //t//).
The above shows that in English, pronounced as /[k]/ and pronounced as /[kʰ]/ are allophones of a single phoneme pronounced as //k//. In some languages, however, pronounced as /[kʰ]/ and pronounced as /[k]/ 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, pronounced as /[kʰ]/ is the first sound of, meaning "cheerful", but pronounced as /[k]/ is the first sound of, meaning "riddles". Icelandic, therefore, has two separate phonemes pronounced as //kʰ// and pronounced as //k//.
A pair of words like Icelandic: kátur and Icelandic: gátur (above) that differ only in one phone is called a minimal pair for the two alternative phones in question (in this case, pronounced as /[kʰ]/ and pronounced as /[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, pronounced as /[t]/ and pronounced as /[d]/ belong to separate phonemes, pronounced as //t// and pronounced as //d//; 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.[1]
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 pronounced as /[h]/ (as in hat) and pronounced as /[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. 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.[2]
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, 'Confucian' and 'confusion' are a valid minimal pair.
Besides segmental phonemes such as vowels and consonants, there are also suprasegmental features of pronunciation (such as tone and stress, syllable boundaries and other forms of juncture, nasalization and vowel harmony), which, in many languages, change the meaning of words and so are phonemic.
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: pronounced as //ɪnˈvaɪt// for the verb, pronounced as //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:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| Hanzi | Chinese: 媽 | Chinese: 麻 | Chinese: 馬 | Chinese: 罵 | Chinese: 嗎 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pinyin | Chinese: mā | Chinese: má | Chinese: mǎ | Chinese: mà | Chinese: ma |
| IPA | |||||
| 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.
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 grc|φώνημα|phōnēma, "sound made, utterance, thing spoken, speech, language"[3]) 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 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. Daniel Jones became the first linguist in the western world to use the term phoneme in its current sense, employing the word in his article "The phonetic structure of the Sechuana Language".[4] The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoy 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 (though not Sapir) rejected the idea of a cognitive or psycholinguistic function for the phoneme.
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 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 tonemes. 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 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.
See 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.
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.
Biuniqueness is a requirement of classic structuralist phonemics. It means that a given phone, wherever it occurs, must unambiguously be assigned to one and only one phoneme. In other words, the mapping between phones and phonemes is required to be many-to-one rather than many-to-many. The notion of biuniqueness was controversial among some pre-generative linguists and was prominently challenged by Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
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 pronounced as //t// or pronounced as //d// (in the appropriate environments) to be realized with the phone pronounced as /[ɾ]/ (an alveolar flap). For example, the same flap sound may be heard in the words hitting and bidding, although it is intended to realize the phoneme pronounced as //t// in the first word and pronounced as //d// in the second. This appears to contradict biuniqueness.
For further discussion of such cases, see the next section.
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 underlying representation is not realized in any of its phonetic representations (surface forms). The term was introduced by Paul Kiparsky (1968), and contrasts with contextual neutralization where some phonemes are not contrastive in certain environments.[5] Some phonologists prefer not to specify a unique phoneme in such cases, since to do so would mean providing redundant or even arbitrary information – instead they use the technique of underspecification. An archiphoneme is an object sometimes used to represent an underspecified phoneme.
An example of neutralization is provided by the Russian vowels pronounced as //a// and pronounced as //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 pronounced as /[ə]/ (for details, see vowel reduction in Russian). In order to assign such an instance of pronounced as /[ə]/ to one of the phonemes pronounced as //a// and pronounced as //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 pronounced as /[ə]/ to a specific phoneme in some or all of these cases, although it might be assigned to an archiphoneme, written something like pronounced as ///A///, which reflects the two neutralized phonemes in this position, or pronounced as /{a|o}}}, reflecting its unmerged values.
A somewhat different example is found in English, with the three nasal phonemes pronounced as //m, n, ŋ//. In word-final position these all contrast, as shown by the minimal triplet sum pronounced as //sʌm//, sun pronounced as //sʌn//, sung pronounced as //sʌŋ//. However, before a stop such as pronounced as //p, t, k// (provided there is no morpheme boundary between them), only one of the nasals is possible in any given position: pronounced as //m// before pronounced as //p//, pronounced as //n// before pronounced as //t// or pronounced as //d//, and pronounced as //ŋ// before pronounced as //k//, as in limp, lint, link (pronounced as //lɪmp//, pronounced as //lɪnt//, pronounced as //lɪŋk//). 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 pronounced as ///N///, and state the underlying representations of limp, lint, link to be pronounced as ///lɪNp//, //lɪNt//, //lɪNk///.
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 pronounced as ///A/// and pronounced as ///N/// given above. Other ways the second of these has been notated include pronounced as /m-n-ŋ/, pronounced as //
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