Phonemes ( 101)

 

ENGLISH COACHING CENTER

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Phonemes ( 101)

The phoneme is, strictly speaking, defined without consideration of higher-level linguistic structures apart from recording differences in its immediate phonetic environment that condition allophonic variants. To define the phoneme, it is merely necessary to note that two otherwise identical utterances (in practice usually words, because they constitute the minimal utterance length in a naming task) are different because of the presence of two different sound units. However, the existence of morpheme-dependent sound alternations of otherwise distinctive sound segments was a well established phenomenon and needed to be dealt with in the overall description of the phoneme. Depending on the overriding philosophies of the scientists involved, different solutions were offered.

For the American Structuralists, the definition of the phoneme inventory was important, as was the procedural principle of separating the levels of analysis. Thus, the question of alternations was dealt with as a separate morphophonemic level of analysis, and the phonemes involved in a morphological alternation, such as /k/-/s/ in electric-electricity (/iˈlektrik/- /ilekˈtrisiti/), constituted a ‘morphophoneme’ (e.g. Swadesh, 1934; Pike, 1947; Hockett, 1955). At the level of phonemic analysis, there was no interest in complicating the inventory by introducing archiphonemes to cover cases of positional neutralization, as with German, Dutch, or Russian final devoicing. Distributional gaps in the system were accepted.

It was fairly late before the relationship between morphemes and phonemes was clarified (Hockett, 1961): Morphemes were described as being composed of morphophonemes (a one-to-one relationship), which are represented by phonemes (a one-to-many relationship); at the same time, morphemes are represented by morphs (a one-to-many relationship), which are composed of phonemes (a one-to-one relationship). The complex relationship that thus exists between the morphemes and phonemes – namely, via morphs on the one hand and morphophonemes on the other – is defined as ‘programming’: morphemes are programmed into a phoneme sequence.

When on the other hand the system of oppositions is of prime interest, as in Prague phonology or in Glossematics, neutralization is an important property of a system. The Prague concept of the ‘archiphoneme’ covers contextually and structurally determined neutralization. The opposition involved must be bilateral and consist of a minimal (single feature) contrast. The example most commonly quoted is the neutralization of voicing where, for example, the /p-b, t-d, k-ɡ/ oppositions no longer operate. Contextually determined voicing neutralization occurs in Russian before obstruents (anticipatory voicing assimilation). Structurally determined neutralization is found for the German /s-z/ opposition, which only operates word medially; initially, only /z/ occurs in singleton onsets, and finally, only /s/ occurs. The archiphoneme may be represented either by one of the symbols in each pair or by a capital letter (e.g., /P, T, K/ or /S/) to signal the archiphoneme status. Alternatively, as is often the case with vowel neutralization, a symbol intermediate to the phoneme values (for example /ə/) may be selected.

In Russia, the Moscow School used the term ‘hyperphoneme’ (Reformatski, 1970, cited in Fischer-Jørgensen, 1975) for a concept very similar to the archiphoneme to capture the reduction in the number of vowel oppositions from five in ‘strong’ (stressed) to three in ‘weak’ (unstressed) position. Because only two vowel oppositions (/ɑ-o/ and /e-i/) are neutralized and /u/ has no opposition partner to neutralize with, the hyperphoneme concept cannot be equated exactly with the archiphoneme. Previous work by Bernštejn (1962, cited in Fischer-Jørgensen, 1975) had also addressed phoneme alternations of the “first, second, and third degree,” covering the phenomena dealt with elsewhere under the topics allophony, neutralization, and morphophonemics. Alternations of the first two degrees were called ‘divergences’ (neutralization also being termed substitution), and morphologically conditioned alternations were called ‘transformations.’

 

By Manoj Sir