Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
The variation may be conditioned by the phonological, morphological, and/or syntactic environment in which the morpheme finds itself. Alternations provide linguists with data that allow them to determine the allophones and allomorphs of a language's phonemes and morphemes and to develop analyses determining the distribution of those allophones ...
Phonetic change can occur without any modification to the phoneme inventory or phonemic correspondences. This change is purely allophonic or subphonemic. This can entail one of two changes: either the phoneme turns into a new allophone—meaning the phonetic form changes—or the distribution of allophones of the phoneme changes.
The term allomorph describes the realization of phonological variations for a specific morpheme. [1] The different allomorphs that a morpheme can become are governed by morphophonemic rules. These phonological rules determine what phonetic form, or specific pronunciation , a morpheme will take based on the phonological or morphological context ...
Such spoken variations of a single phoneme are known by linguists as allophones. Linguists use slashes in the IPA to transcribe phonemes but square brackets to transcribe more precise pronunciation details, including allophones; they describe this basic distinction as phonemic versus phonetic.
Specific allophonic variations, and the particular correspondences between allophones (realizations of speech sound) and phonemes (underlying perceptions of speech sound) can vary even within languages. For example, speakers of Quebec French often express voiceless alveolar stops (/t/) as an affricate.
A transcription which includes some allophonic detail but is still closely linked to the phonemic structure of an utterance is called an allophonic transcription. The advantage of narrower transcription is that it can help learners to produce exactly the right sound and allows linguists to make detailed analyses of language variation. [ 4 ]
There is significant allophonic variation in /əʉ/, including a backed allophone [ɔʊ] before a word-final or preconsonantal /l/. The first part of this allophone is in the same position as /ɔ/, but [ɔʊ] differs from it in that it possesses an additional closing glide, which also makes it longer than /ɔ/.