1. FOƱNI:M ƏND
DɪSTɪŊ(K)TɪV
FI:TƩƏR ΘI:ƏRI:
phoneme and distinctive
feature theory

2. Presenters
2

3. DIFFERENCE?
/k/
kit [ko]
after s
[kh]
Initial
[k]
elsewhere
k
s ill
sac k
We pronounce them differently but we know they are the
same sound.
How do we know two sounds are the same or different? 3

4. 4

5. PHONOLOGY
 Phonology is how speech sounds are organized and
affect one another in pronunciation.
 Key terms:
 Phone
 Phoneme
 allophone
 This organization is explained in phonological rules
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6. CONCEPTUALITY
Articulatory phonetics • Phonology
Real sounds = phones • system and rules of sound
patterns
• [p], [t], [k]
• Abstractions = phoneme
• [i], [æ]
• /p/, /t/, /k/
• /i/, /æ/
• Inventory of sounds and
how they are realized.
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7. Phonetics Phonology
• Phone • Phoneme
CAN U IDENTIFY SMALLEST SEGMENT OF :
SIGN LANGUAGE
OR
SIGN WRITING?
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8. PHONEME
a PHONEME is the minimal distinctive
(contrastive ) linguistic sound
Mental unit Meaningful Not realized
Phoneme
Physical/environ Meaningless Realized
Phone mental unit
Phonetic unit Variation of variations
Allophone phoneme
8

9.  phoneme
 (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound uttered") is
the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form
meaningful contrasts between utterances. (Wikipedia)
 Segment: "any discrete unit that can be identified,
either physically or auditorily, in the stream of
speech."
multiple segments
vowels, consonants
supra-segmental 1. separate and
tone,stress, length,intonation
individual,
secondary articulations
nasalization
vowel harmony such as consonants and
Marginal segments vowels,
onomatopoeic words, 9
interjections, loan words 2. occur in a distinct
Source: Wikipedia
temporal order

10. PHONEME
 A unit of speech that can be used to differentiate
words(e.g.“cat”/kaet/vs.“bat”/baet/).
 Phonemes identify minimal pairs in a language.
 The set of phonemes in a language subject to interpretation;
most languages have 20 to 40 phonemes.
 The phoneme cannot therefore be acoustically defined. The
phoneme is instead a feature of language structure. 10

11. Defining
phoneme
Easy?
NO 11

12. what is the
What sort of content how does
entity is the one identify
phoneme? of the phonemes
phoneme
Issues
12

13. 1. WHAT SORT OF ENTITY IS THE PHONEME?
 Twaddell (1935)
 1) phoneme is a physical reality
 “count for practical purposes as if they were one and the
same.” JONES (1967: 258)
 2) it is a psychological notion
 a mental or psychological reality
 the phoneme is a constant acoustic and auditory image (Sommerfelt); a
thought sound (Beni); a sound idea (Trubetzkoy); a psychological
equivalent of an empirical sound (UÓaszyn);
 In modern terms:
 phoneme is some sort of mental representation
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TWADDELL criticized this mental phenomenon

14. 2. WHAT IS THE CONTENT OF THE PHONEME
 What are phonemes made of? How are they represented?
underspecified,
 what position specific phoneme takes in the given phonemicin the sense
system.
that it
 Which phoneme is in the opposition to a specific phonemeconsists only of
contrastive
 Sapir (1925, 1933) Sapir’s “point in the pattern.” properties and
other features
 phoneme as a set of contrastively underspecified features omitted
are
 This notion further corresponded to the theory of Distinctive feature
⇒ this underspecification theory has been proposed under generative
phonology under the name Modified Contrastive Specification
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15. CONTINUE…
 Prague School: Phonemic make-up or content
 phonemic make-up(Jakobson)
 phonemic content of the phoneme (Trubetzkoy)
those properties which are common to all
variants of a phoneme
Each phoneme has a definable phonemic
content only because the system of
distinctive oppositions shows a definite
order or structure.
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16. 16

17. 3. HOW DOES ONE IDENTIFY PHONEMES
Practical aspect of phoneme:
phonemic analysis
 whether a sound is a
 single phoneme (/ts/,/nd/, or /oe/)
 a sequence of phonemes (/t-s/, /n-d/, or /s-j/).
 Minimal pair
 Differ in one phonological element (phone, phoneme, toneme or
chroneme )
 complementary distribution
 Contrastive distribution
 Free variation
 Mutation methods
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18. SPOT THE ODD ONE OUT
 Look carefully at the words below.
 Can you spot the phoneme that is common to each
set?
 Which word doesn’t share the common phoneme?
 tree feet grew sleep
 rain pain mail slap
 know seat grow show
 Boat away play stay
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19. VIEWS OF WHAT THE PHONEME IS
 Empiricist notion: Twaddell
 the phoneme is a collection of sounds (a fictitious unit )
 Mentalist: Chomsky ( realistic view)
 the phoneme is the mental category that corresponds to a
coherent set of sounds in a language
 American structuralist tradition:
 a phoneme is defined according to its allophones and
environments
 generative tradition:
 a phoneme is defined as a set of distinctive features. 19

20. BLOOMFIELD’S PHONEME
 “The smallest units which make a difference in meaning”
 “A minimum unit of distinctive sound feature” (p. 77).
 non-mentalistic unit
 He identifies “primary” (segmental sounds) and “secondary”
(stress and tone) phonemes according to their function in
language (primary: syllable forming; secondary: structuring
larger units).
 Phonemes are defined by their participation in structural sets.
 (syllabic, open-syllable, closed syllable, non-syllabic, initial,
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 medial, final, initial cluster, final cluster, etc.)

21. COMMON PHONEMIC RULES
 Aspiration [h]
 Unreleased Stop [ ̚ ]
 Flap [ɾ]
 Dental Consonants [⊓]
 Velarization [ɫ]
 Voicelessness [˚]
 Vowel lengthening [ ]
 Vowel nasalization [~]
21

22. Phonemic Awareness
 Phonemic Awareness is a
subset of phonological
awareness in which listeners
are able to hear, identify and
manipulate phonemes, the
smallest units of sound that can
differentiate meaning.
 Separating the spoken word
"cat" into three distinct
phonemes,
/k/, /æ/, and /t/, requires
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phonemic awareness skill.

23. 23

24. COMMON TYPES OF PHONEMIC AWARENESS
 Isolating
 Hear and isolate sounds in initial, medial or final positions in
word (e.g. bat, ball, bell, pal)
 Segmenting
 Pronounce each phoneme in order as it occurs in word (bat
>> b-a-t)
 Blending
 Combine phonemes to make a word (hear sh-ip and say ship)
 Manipulating
 Add or delete sounds in word to make new word
 (add a “t” to an” and say ant; replace the sound “d” in sad with
a “t” and say sat)
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25. THEORETICAL TIMELINE OF PHONEME
 Ancient forerunners of modern descriptive linguistics (P¯ANINI, PATAÑJALI
(India), the Greeks & “Anon” (Iceland, 12th C.)) clearly recognized the
systematic nature between distinctive sound properties and the identity of
words in their languages
 DE SAUSSURE (1857-1913) used “phonème”, first as a term for speech
sounds, later as a purely functional entity.
 A. Dufriche-Desgenettes 1873
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 French word phonème as a speech sound
Source: B. Elan Dresher

26. TIMELINE…
 Structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure(1879), E. Sapir, and L. Bloomfield)
 Tried to eliminate cognitive and psycholinguistic function of phoneme
 Used to refer to a hypothesized sound in a proto-language together with its
reflexes in the daughter languages
 Polish Kazan school (Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay and MikoÓaj Kruszewski
1875–1895)
 As an abstract set of alternating invariant psycho phonetic elements : fonema,
 Prague School 1926–1935
 the first group to formulate an explicit phonological theory
 Generative linguistics (Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle)
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 modern phonology