The phoneme. Allophones of a phoneme

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 538.

In connected speech a sound is generally modified by its phonetic environment, (i.e. by the neighboring sounds), by the position it occupies in a word or an utterance; it is also modified by prosodic features, such as stress, speech melody, & tempo of speech.

Compare / p / in "pill" (i.e. in initial position), in "spill" (i.e. after /s/), in "slip" (i.e. in final position), in "slipper" (i.e. between vowels). These various / p / sounds differ in manner of articulation or in acoustic qualities. But they don't differ phonologically, if one of the various / p / sounds are substituted for another, the meaning of the word will not change. Every language has a limited number of sound types which are shared by all the speakers of the language & are linguistically important bec. they distinguish words in the language. In English there are 20 vowel phonemes & 24 consonant phonemes.All the actual speech sounds are allophones (or variants) of the phonemes that exist in the language. Those that distinguish words, when opposed to one another in the same phonetic position, are realizations of different phonemes. E.g. /V/ & /W/ in English are realizations of 2 different phonemes bec. they distinguish such words as "vine" & "wine", "veal" & "wheel" etc.Those sounds that can not distinguish words in a definite language & occur only in certain positions or in combination w/ certain sounds are realizations of one and the same phoneme, its allophones (or variants). E.g. the "dark" / l / & the "clear" / l / are variants, or allophones of the same phoneme.Allophones of a certain phoneme are speech sounds which are realizations of one and the same phoneme & which, therefore, can not distinguish words. Their articulatory & acoustic distinctions are conditioned by their position & their phonetic environment.