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The term "allophone" was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf circa 1929. In doing so, he is thought to have placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory. [4] The term was popularized by George L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology [5] and went on to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition.
Complementary distribution is the distribution of phones in their respective phonetic environments in which one phone never appears in the same phonetic context as the other. When two variants are in complementary distribution, one can predict when each will occur because one can simply look at the environment in which the allophone is occurring.
The following are the most commonly analyzed kinds of emic units in linguistics: A phoneme is an underlying object whose surface representations are phones (speech sounds); different phones representing the same phoneme are called allophones of that phoneme.
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents.In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.
In linguistics, an alternation is the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization. Each of the various realizations is called an alternant . The variation may be conditioned by the phonological, morphological , and/or syntactic environment in which the morpheme finds itself.
In RP, the phone , apart from being a frequent allophone of /ʊ/ (as in foot [fɨ̞ʔt]) in younger speakers, appears only as an allophone of /ɪ/, which is often centralized when it occurs as a weak vowel, and never as an allophone of /ə/. Therefore, [ˈlɛnɨ̞n] can stand for only "Lenin", not "Lennon", which has a lower vowel: [ˈlɛnən]
Among the Germanic languages, the tap allophone occurs in American and Australian English and in Northern Low Saxon. In American and Australian English it tends to be an allophone of intervocalic / t / and / d / , leading to homophonous pairs such as "me t al" / "me d al" and "la tt er" / "la dd er" – see tapping .
This all describes the phonetic environment of [æ]. In linguistic notation it may be written as /m_t, where the slash can be read as "in the environment", and the underscore represents the target phone's position relative to its neighbours. [1] The expression therefore can be read as "in the environment after the m sound and before the t sound".