Page 125 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 10: Phonemes: Detailed Study

of cupboard or the [Y:] a Southern British English speaker has in car, while [c] appears before front Notes
vowels, like the [w] of kitchen or the [i:] in Southern British English keys. Typically, speakers control
predictable differences of this type automatically and subconsciously, and sometimes resist any
suggestion that the sounds involved, like [k] and [c] in English, are different at all, requiring
uncharacteristically close and persistent listening to tell the two apart. The difference between [k]
and [c] in English is redundant; in phonological terms, this means the difference arises automatically
in different contexts, but does not convey any new information.
Returning to our orthographic analogy, recall that every instance of a hand-written a or A will be
different from every other instance, even produced by the same person. In just the same way, the
same speaker producing the same words (say, multiple repetitions of kitchen cupboard) will produce
minutely different instances of [k] and [c]. However, a hierarchical organisation of these variants can
be made: in terms of spelling, we can characterise variants as belonging to the lower-case or capital
set, and those in turn as realisations of the abstract grapheme <a>. The subclasses have a consistent
and predictable distribution, with upper-case at the beginnings of proper nouns and sentences, and
lower-case everywhere else: we can say that this distribution is rule-governed. Similarly again, we
can classify all the variants we hear as belonging to either fronter [c] or backer [k], although we are
not, at least without a little phonetic consciousness-raising, aware of that difference in the way we
are with a and A; presumably the fact that we learn writing later, and with more explicit instruction,
accounts for our higher level of awareness here.
In turn, [c] and [k], which native speakers regard as the same, are realisations of an abstract unit we
call the phoneme (where the ending-eme, as in grapheme, means ‘some abstract unit’). Phonemes
appear between slash brackets, and are conventionally represented by IPA aymbols, in this case /k/.
As with graphemes, we could in principle use an abstract symbol for this abstract unit, say / /, or
/k/, or give it a number or a name: but again, it is convenient and clear to use the same symbol as
one of its realisations. Those realistions, here [k] nd [c], are allophones of the phoneme /k/.
To qualify as allophones of the same phoneme, two (or moe) phones, that is sounds, must meet two
criteria. First, their distribution must be predictable: we must be able to specify where one will turn
up, and where the other; and those sets of contexts must not overlap. If this is true, the two phones
are said to be in complementary distribution. Second, if one phone is exceptionally substituted for
the other in the same context, that substitution must not correspond to a meaning difference. Eve if
you say kitchen cupboard with the [k] first and the [c] second (and that won’t be easy, because you
have been doing the opposite as long as you have been speaking English—it will be even harder than
trying to write at your normal speed while substituting small a for capital A and vice versa), another
English speaker will only notice that there is something vguely odd about your speech, if that. She
may think you have an unfamiliar accent; but crucially, she will understand that you mean ‘kitchen
cupboard’, and not something else. This would not be so where a realisation of one phoneme is replaced
by a realisation of another: if the [k] allophone of /k/ is replaced by the [t] allophone of /t/, then tall
will be understood instead of call.
Finally, just as the orthographic rules can vary between languages and across time, so no two languages
or periods will have exactly the same phonology. Although in English [k] and [c] are allophones of
the same phoneme, and are regarded as the same sound, in Hungarian they are different phonemes.
We can test for this by looking for minimal pairs: that is, pairs of words differing in meaning, where
the only difference in sound is that one has one of the two phones at issue where the other has the
other (think of tall and call). In Hungarian, we find minimal pairs like kuka [kuka] ‘dustbin’ and kutya
[kuca] ‘dog’. It follows that [k] and [c] are not in complementary but in contrastive distribution; that
interchanging them does make a meaing difference between words; and hence that [k] and [c] belong
to different phonemes, /k/ and /c/ respectively, in Hungarian. Unsurprisingly, speakers of Hungarian
find the difference between [k] and [c] glaringly obvious, and would be extremely surprised to find
that English speakers typically lump them together as the same sound.
As for differences between periods of the same language, it is straight forward to demonstrate that
Modern English [f] and [v] contrast, or are in complementary distribution, since minimal pairs like
fat [f] versus vat [v], leaf versus leave, or safer versus saver are easy to come by. The phoneme system of

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