The notion of the phoneme. The phoneme and its allophones.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 498.

THE PHONEME.

THE FUNCTIONAL ASPECT OF SPEECH SOUNDS.

Lecture 2

1. The notion of the phoneme. The phoneme and its main aspects.
2. Relationship between the phoneme and its allophones.
3. The main trends in phoneme theory.

When we talk about the sounds of a language, the term “sound” can be interpreted in two rather different ways. In the first place we can say that [t] and [d] are two different sounds in English :[t] being fortis and [d] being lenis. We can illustrate this by showing how they contrast with each other to make a difference of the meaning in a large number of pairs, such as die – tie, seat – seed, etc. But on the other hand, if we listen carefully, in speech we pronounce not the sound type [t] which is aspirated, alveolar, forelingual, apical, occlusive, plosive, voiceless, fortis – according to the classificatory definition, but – one of its variants, e.g. labialized in the word twice, post-alveolar in try, exploded nasally in written, exploded laterally in little, pronounced without aspiration in stay, etc. In both examples the sounds differ in one articulatory feature only: in the second case the difference between the sounds has functionally no significance. It is perfectly clear that the sense of “sound” in these two cases is different. To avoid this ambiguity linguists use two separate terms: a “phoneme” is used to mean a “sound” in its contrastive sense and “allophone” is used for sounds which are variants of a phoneme: they usually occur in different positions in a word and cannot contrast with each other, nor be used to make meaningful distinctions.

So the only important differences for a language are those which are associated with the meaning. We can differentiate and consequently distinguish and recognize the shape of words opposing one sound to another or even to many of them: e.g. in the words bead-bid, bad-bed, bird-board, bud-bard the sounds [b] and [d] are identical while a vowel sound differs. The meaning differentiation of the above given words is based upon the quality differentiation of the vowels. We can see that they are used as independent units for the purpose of word differentiation.

Not only vowels can be opposed. In the following words: line, pine, fine the consonants are opposed. The above examples show that when the sound shape of words is changed, consequently their meaning changes if we replace one sound to another. So in opposing forms of words we discover a close connection between soundingandmeaningof the same words. We must understand that this connection is conventional, traditional because it was formed and consolidated by the given language community in the course of ages. There are some examples when in the course of time the sound shape of a word was changed without effecting the meaning: