Phoneme and Allophone 语言学论文

In the last term, we learned phoneme and allophone. And the followling list what I learned.

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.

Thus 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 of a phoneme is the /k/ sound in the words kit and skill. Although most native English speakers don't notice this, in most English dialects, the /k/ sounds in these two words are actually pronounced differently: they are different speech sounds, or phones. In our example, the /k/ in kit is aspirated, while the /k/ in skill is unaspirated. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme in English because, if an English speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other phonemes could be substituted (creating a minimal pair) which would cause a change in meaning: producing words like still (substituting /t/), spill (substituting /p/) and swill (substituting /w/). These other sounds (/t/, /p/ and /w/) are, in English, different phonemes.

Phones that belong to the same phoneme, such as [t] and [tʰ] for English /t/, are called allophones. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones of the same phoneme or separate phonemes relies on finding minimal pairs: words that differ by only the phone in question. For example, the words tip and dip illustrate that in English [t] and [d] are separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/, in English: the two words have different meanings that are readily recognizable, meaning that English speakers can readily distinguish between the two sounds. Some linguists 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 or articulatory in nature.

In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds (or phones) used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, [pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language. Although a phoneme's allophones are all alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable. Changing the allophone used by native speakers for a given phoneme in a specific context usually will not change the meaning of a word but the result may sound non-native or unintelligible. Speakers of a given language usually perceive one phoneme in their language as a single distinctive sound in that language and are \"both unaware of and even shocked by\" the allophone variations used to pronounce single phonemes.

For example, [pʰ] as in pin and [p] as in spin are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language because they cannot distinguish words. English speakers treat them as the same sound, but they are different: the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated (plain). Plain [p] also occurs as the p in cap [kʰæp], or the second p in

paper [pʰeɪ.pɚ]. Chinese languages treat these two phones differently; for example in Mandarin, [p] (written b in Pinyin) and [pʰ] (written p) contrast phonemically. Sounds that are merely phonetic variants of the same phoneme are allophones. Notice that any two sounds of a given language represent either two allophones of the same phoneme (if the sounds can be interchanged in words with no resulting change in meaning, such as the p's of pit and keep) or two different phonemes (if the sounds cannot be interchanged without a resulting change in meaning, such as the m and s of milk and silk) \"Now consider the word stop. If you say the word several times, you will probably notice that sometimes the final /p/ contains more aspiration and sometimes, less. (In fact, if you end the word with your lips together and do not release the /p/, it contains no aspiration at all.) Since you are not pronouncing stop as part of a larger chunk of language that varies from utterance to utterance (for example, John told Mary to stop the car versus Stop and go versus When you come to the sign, stop), the phonetic environment of the /p/ remains constant--it is at the end of the word and preceded by /a/. In other words, we cannot predict when a particular allophone with more or less aspiration is likely to occur, so the allophones of /p/ must be in free variation.\"

(Thomas Murray, The Structure of English. Allyn and Bacon, 1995) Reference: General Linguistics For Beginners

Thomas Murray, The Structure of English. Allyn and Bacon, 1995

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