Phonetics and Phonology (eng507)
Topic-014: Introduction to Key Concepts in Phonetics and Phonology
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| Topic-014: Introduction to Key Concepts in Phonetics and Phonology There are various terms which are frequently used in phonetics and phonology. They mainly include phone, phoneme and allophone. For better understanding, we need to distinguish among them. A phone is a sound (or a segment) which has some physical feature and the term is mostly used in anon- technical sense. A phoneme is the smallest meaningful unit of sound (therefore, a smallest unit in phonology) in a language and this meaningful unit of sound is one that will change one word into another word. For example, the difference in both white and right (ignore spellings here, focus on sounds) is the difference of sounds (w – r) which are phonemes and they have the ability to change meaning. Similarly, take another example of cat vs. bat (k – b. Linguists have also defined phoneme as a group or class of sound events having common patterns of articulation. If phoneme is a group then allophones are the group members. Let us discuss now allophone. An allophone is a definable systematic variant of a phoneme. Compare the following sets s sound in words like sill, still and spill or in words like seed, steed and speed k sound in words like, key and cart sound in words like true and tea n sound in words like tenth and ten Copyright Virtual University of Pakistan Phonetics and Phonology (ENG) VU If you carefully analyze these words, you should find that the specific sound is not exactly the same in the given word examples. But since these variants do not change meaning (and we simply take them as alternate sounds, they are called allophone. Now, to summarize this discussion • Phone is a sound pattern having some acoustic features. • Phoneme is a group of sound having the ability to change meaning. • Allophones are the systematic variants of a phoneme. Download 1.01 Mb. Share with your friends:
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