Phoneme

This article is about the speech unit. For the JavaME library, see phoneME.

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".

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 in the Overview section 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.

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).

For more details, see Transcription methods below.

Overview

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 and  skill ). 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/.

A pair of words like kátur and gátur 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.

When a phoneme has more than one allophone, the allophone 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.

Transcription methods

As mentioned above, the common notation used in linguistics employs virgules (slashes) around symbols that stand for phonemes, as in /f/, and square brackets around symbols that stand for phones, as in [f]. (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. However descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. For computer typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum have been developed to represent IPA symbols in plain text, although modern web browsers can display IPA symbols correctly as long as the operating system provides the appropriate fonts.

For a list of the phonemes of the main varieties of English, see International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects.

Correspondence between letters and phonemes

Phonemes are considered to be the basis for alphabetic writing systems. In such systems the written symbols (graphemes) represent, in principle, the phonemes of the language being written. However, because changes in the spoken language are often not accompanied by changes in the established orthography (as well as other reasons, including dialect differences, the effects of morphophonology on orthography, and the use of foreign spellings for some loanwords), the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in a given language may be highly distorted; this is the case with English, for example. (Occasionally, though, such discrepancies are reduced through the establishment of spelling pronunciations.)

The correspondence between symbols and phonemes in alphabetic writing systems is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence. A phoneme might be represented by a combination of two or more letters (digraph, trigraph, etc.), like <sh> in English or <sch> in German (both representing phonemes /ʃ/). Also a single letter may represent two phonemes, as the Russian letter я in some positions. There may also exist spelling/pronunciation rules (such as those for the pronunciation of <c> in Italian) that further complicate the correspondence of letters to phonemes, although they need not affect the ability to predict the pronunciation from the spelling and vice versa, provided the rules are known.

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/).

Biuniqueness

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 /t/ or /d/ (in the appropriate environments) to be realized with the phone [ɾ] (an alveolar flap). For example, the same flap sound may be heard in the words hitting and bidding, although it is clearly intended to realize the phoneme /t/ in the first word and /d/ in the second. This appears to contradict biuniqueness.

Neutralization, archiphoneme, and underspecification

Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they don't contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized.

In English there are three nasal phonemes, /m, n, ŋ/, as shown by the minimal triplet,

/sʌm/	sum
/sʌn/	sun
/sʌŋ/	sung

With rare exceptions, these phonemes are not contrastive before plosives such as /p, t, k/ within the same morpheme. Although all three phones appear before plosives, for example in limp, lint, link ( /lɪmp/, /lɪnt/, /lɪŋk/), only one of these may appear before each of the plosives. That is, the /m, n, ŋ/ distinction is neutralized before each of the plosives /p, t, k/:

• only /m/ occurs before /p/,
• only /n/ before /t/, and
• only /ŋ/ before /k/.

Thus these phonemes are not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists, there is no evidence as to what the underlying representation might be. If one hypothesizes that one is dealing with only a single underlying nasal, there is no reason to pick one of the three phonemes /m, n, ŋ/ over the other two.

(In some languages there is only one phonemic nasal anywhere, and due to obligatory assimilation, it surfaces as [m, n, ŋ] in just these environments, so this idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance.)

In certain schools of phonology, such a neutralized distinction is known as an archiphoneme (Nikolai Trubetzkoy of the Prague school is often associated with this analysis). Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter. Following this convention, the neutralization of /m, n, ŋ/ before /p, t, k/ could be notated as |N|, and limp, lint, link would be represented as |lɪNp, lɪNt, lɪNk|. (The |pipes| indicate underlying representation.) Other ways this archiphoneme could be notated are |m-n-ŋ|, {m, n, ŋ}, or |n*|.

Another example from American English is the neutralization of the plosives /t, d/ following a stressed syllable. Phonetically, both are realized in this position as [ɾ], a voiced alveolar flap. This can be heard by comparing betting with bedding.

[bɛt]	bet
[bɛd]	bed

with the suffix -ing:

[ˈbɛɾɪŋ]	betting
[ˈbɛɾɪŋ]	bedding

Thus, one cannot say whether the underlying representation of the intervocalic consonant in either word is /t/ or /d/ without looking at the unsuffixed form. This neutralization can be represented as an archiphoneme |D|, in which case the underlying representation of betting or bedding could be |ˈbɛDɪŋ|.

Another way to talk about archiphonemes involves the concept of underspecification: phonemes can be considered fully specified segments while archiphonemes are underspecified segments. In Tuvan, phonemic vowels are specified with the articulatory features of tongue height, backness, and lip rounding. The archiphoneme |U| is an underspecified high vowel where only the tongue height is specified.

phoneme/ archiphoneme	height	backness	roundedness
/i/	high	front	unrounded
/ɯ/	high	back	unrounded
/u/	high	back	rounded
|U|	high

Whether |U| is pronounced as front or back and whether rounded or unrounded depends on vowel harmony. If |U| occurs following a front unrounded vowel, it will be pronounced as the phoneme /i/; if following a back unrounded vowel, it will be as an /ɯ/; and if following a back rounded vowel, it will be an /u/. This can be seen in the following words:

-|Um|			'my'	(the vowel of this suffix is underspecified)
|idikUm|	→	[idikim]	'my boot'	(/i/ is front and unrounded)
|xarUm|	→	[xarɯm]	'my snow'	(/a/ is back and unrounded)
|nomUm|	→	[nomum]	'my book'	(/o/ is back and rounded)

Phonemes in sign languages

In sign languages, the basic elements of gesture and location were formerly called cheremes or cheiremes but they are now generally referred to as phonemes, as with spoken languages.

Sign language phonemes may be classified as Tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula), Dez (the hand shape, from designator), Sig (the motion, from signation), and with some researchers, Ori (orientation). Facial expressions and mouthing are also phonemic.

Stokoe notation is used by researchers to denote the phonemes of sign languages. Originally developed for American Sign Language, it has also been applied to British Sign Language by Kyle and Woll, and to Australian Aboriginal sign languages by Adam Kendon. Other sign notations, such as the Hamburg Notation System and SignWriting, are phonetic scripts capable of writing any sign language. However, because they are not constrained by phonology, they do not yield a specific spelling for a sign. The SignWriting form, for example, will be different depending on whether the signer is left or right-handed, even though this makes no difference to the meaning of the sign.

Numbers of phonemes in different languages

A given language will use only a small subset of the many possible sounds that the human speech organs can produce, and (because of allophony) the number of distinct phonemes will generally be smaller than the number of identifiably different sounds. Different languages vary considerably in the number of phonemes they have in their systems (although apparent variation may sometimes result from the different approaches taken by the linguists doing the analysis). The total phonemic inventory in languages varies from as few as 11 in Rotokas to as many as 112 in !Xóõ (including four tones).

The number of phonemically distinct vowels can be as low as two, as in Ubyx and Arrernte. At the other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has 14 vowel qualities, 12 of which may occur long or short, making 26 oral vowels, plus 6 nasalized vowels, long and short, making a total of 38 vowels; while !Xóõ achieves 31 pure vowels, not counting its additional variation by vowel length, by varying the phonation. As regards consonant phonemes, Rotokas has only six, while !Xóõ has somewhere in the neighborhood of 77, and Ubyx 81. The English language uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowel phonemes, including diphthongs, although its 22 to 26 consonants are close to average.

Some languages, such as French, have no phonemic tone or stress, while several of the Kam–Sui languages have nine tones, and one of the Kru languages, Wobe, has been claimed to have 14, though this is disputed.

The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/. The most common consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/. Relatively few languages lack any of these, although it does happen: for example, Arabic lacks /p/, standard Hawaiian lacks /t/, Mohawk and Tlingit lack /p/ and /m/, Hupa lacks both /p/ and a simple /k/, colloquial Samoan lacks /t/ and /n/, while Rotokas and Quileute lack /m/ and /n/.

See also

Alphabetic principle Alternation (linguistics) Chereme Complementary distribution Diphone Diaphoneme Emic and etic Free variation Initial-stress-derived noun

Minimal pair Morphophonology Phone Phonemic differentiation Phonemic orthography Phonology Sphoṭa Phonotactics

Toneme Triphone Viseme