Asignatura: Fontica y Fonologa del Ingls

Profesor: Daro Barrera

UNIT 5: PHONOLOGY (I) PHONEMIC ANALYSIS

THEORY

1. What is a phoneme? What is an allophone?

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in the speech of a language that cannot be analysed into smaller linear units and
that can distinguish one word from another. Phonemes are often presented by // in transcription (/p/ and /b/ in pat bat).
So /p/ and /b/ are phonemes because they can distinguish between pat and bat. /c/ is another phoneme because it can
distinguish between cat, pat and bat.

An allophone are any of the variants making up a single phoneme. I mean, variations in the realization of phonemes, the
different pronunciation of the phonemes. So, for example, you might pronunce the letter 'T' differently in two words
'stand' and 'tip'. A common test to deterinate whether two phones are allophones or separate phonemes relies on finding
minimal pairs: words that differ by only the phones in question. For example, the words 'tip' and 'dip' illustrate that [t] and
[d] are separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/ in English.

2. Minimals pairs, constrastive distribution, complementary distribution and free variation.

Minimal pairs: A minimally phonologically distinctive pair of words establishes a minimal distinctive linguistic sound,
known as a PHONEME, from among the acoustically distinguishable sounds in a language, known as the phones of the
language.

Contrastive distribution: A minimal distinctive sound is one which can distinguish one word from
another when all other sounds are identical. To establish the phonemes of a language such
minimal pairs, two words differing in just one distinguishable sound (hence 'minimal'), must be
found for all the phonemes.
Complementary distribution: Indicates that two basic sounds are not independent phonemes, but conditioned variants
of the same phoneme, of the same minimally distinctive sound. Non-contrastive variants of a phoneme are called
allophones.
Free variation: Two sounds do not represent two separate phonemes if they are in free variation; that is, if you may use
one in any position you may use the other without any semantic effect. For example, aspiration may be omitted from
stops at the end of words in English, too; however, whether it is dropped or not is indifferent; the meaning of the word
does not change.
3. Linking levels: rules.
In the preceding sections, we saw that we can establish two levels of representation: the underlying (mental) phonemic
level, which contains information concerning the set of contrasts in the phonology of a language, and the surface phonetic
level, which specifies the particular positional variants (allophones) which realise the underlying phonemes.