What is phoneme?

What is a Phoneme?

By Marco A. Bomfoco
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The core areas of grammar are phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Simplifying matters somewhat, linguistic handbooks say that phonetics deals with the physical aspect of sounds, whereas phonology deals with the psychological aspect. But, in fact, phonological descriptions deal with both aspects. In other words, there is always a phonetic (orphysical) aspect on a phonological description.

Phonology is the science of speech patterns. More precisely, phonology studies the phonological processes or the grammatical properties of the sounds, that is, how sounds combine to make morphemes and words. Hence, the primary aim of phonology is to provide a phonemic representation of morphemes and a series of processes that adequately express thephonological generalizations of a language.

Sounds are the product of human anatomy, the vocal tract: the lips, the tongue, the velum, and the larynx. Within the field of phonetics, there are two basic areas: a) articulatory phonetics, the study of how speech sounds are articulated; and b) acoustic phonetics, the study of the physical properties of the sounds.

Let us now consider that speechsounds have structure and function in languages.

Each language or dialect has its own unique set of sounds, its sound system. Languages use sounds in very different ways: the sound inventories may be dissimilar; the sounds may occur in different orders, and the processes or rules that affect sounds may be different. Yet there are characteristics which are common to all languages (true linguisticuniversals). In brief, language inventories of sounds and the phonological processes that occur in languages are limited in various ways.

Relevant here is the sharp distinction between a sound or a phonetic element (phone) and a phonological element (phoneme). A phoneme is one of the basic abstract sound units which every accent of a language possesses. Of course, as noted earlier, phonemicsegments in a language represent a physical phonetic reality. And all phonological systems use the same alphabetical symbols for phonemes or phones. The discrete segments or phones are transcribed within square brackets [p], and phonemes are transcribed within forward slashes /p/.

The basic function of sounds is to convey meaning; differences in sound are related to differences in meaning in agiven language. Trubetzkoy says that phonemes are discriminative elements. But how can we work out the inventory of phonemes (not phones) in a language? We can classify sounds based on the possibility of their appearing in the same structural environment. Thus, to determine which sounds belong in the same class (or phoneme) we look for minimal pairs. For example, take the following words in Finnish:/takka/ ('fireplace'), /taakka/ ('burden'), and /taka/ ('back'). We have here two minimal pairs, /takka/ and /taakka/; /takka/ and /taka/. What this means is that in the first pair the vowels, /a/ and /aa/, combine with the same surroundings consonants (/t_kk/) and in the second pair the consonants, /kk/ and /k/, combine with the same sequence (/ta_a/). These sounds relate contrastively to eachother because they appear in the same environment. No doubt, in these examples Finnish uses short and long sounds to distinguish different words. The differences are functionally significant at the level of the word formation.

However, it is not always possible to find minimal pairs. In this the case, it is necessary to rely on "near-minimal pairs", whenever we can assume that the second...