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Unit 11: Allophones–Allophonic Variation in English Speech: Difference between Monopthong and Diphthong Glides

pronouncing stop as part of a larger chunk of language that varies from utterance to utterance (for Notes
example, John told Mary to stop the car versus Stop and go versus when you come to the sign, stop),
the phonetic environment of the /p/ remains constant—it is at the end of the word and preceded by
/a/. In other words, we cannot predict when a particular allophone with more or less aspiration
islikely to occur, so the allophones of /p/ must be in free variation.” (Thomas Murray, the Structure
of English. Allyn and Bacon, 1995)
Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics and phonology are two branches of linguistics that deal primarily with the structure of
human language sounds. Phonetics focuses on the physical manifestations of speech sounds and on
theories of speech production and perception. Phonology is concerned with the systems of rules (or
constraints) that determine how the sounds of a language combine and influence one another.
Most phonetic work falls into the sub-field of articulatory phonetics (the study of the human vocal
tract, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and how to make and describe language sounds), but with
recent advances in computers and the availability of good phonetics software, there has been a recent
boom in acoustic research (the physical properties of sounds-wave forms, pitch, intensity,
spectrograms).
Phonology cares about the entire sound system for a given language. The goal is to formulate a
model/theory which explains not only the sound patterns found in a particular language, but the
patterns found in all languages. Examples of questions which are interesting to phonologists are:
How do sounds change due to the sounds around them? (For example, why does the plural of cat
end with an ‘s’ sound, the plural of dog end with a ‘z’ sound, and the plural of dish end in something
sounding like ‘iz’?) How do sounds combine in a particular language? (For example, English allows
‘t’ and ‘b’ to be followed by ‘t’ rattle, rabble, atlas, ablative—so why then does ‘blick’ sound like a
possible word in English when ‘tlick’ does not?)
Complementary and free-variant Allophones

Every time a speech sound is produced for a given phoneme, it will be slightly different from other
utterances, even for the same speaker. This has led to some debate over how real, and how universal,
phonemes really are (see phoneme for details). Only some of the variation is significant (i.e., detectable
or perceivable) to speakers. There are two types of allophones, based on whether a phoneme must be
pronounced using a specific allophone in a specific situation, or whether the speaker has freedom to
(unconsciously) choose which allophone he or she will use.
When a specific allophone (from a set of allophones that correspond to a phoneme) must be selected
in a given context (i.e. using a different allophone for a phoneme will cause confusion or make the
speaker sound non-native), the allophones are said to be complementary (i.e. the allophones
complement each other, and one is not used in a situation where the usage of another is standard). In
the case of complementary allophones, each allophone is used in a specific phonetic context and may
be involved in a phonological process.
In other cases, the speaker is able to select freely from free variant allophones, based on personal
habit or preference.

Allotone
A tonic allophone is sometimes called an allotone, for example in the neutral tone of Mandarin.
Examples in English vs. other languages
For example, [p ] as in pin and [p] as in spin are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English
h
language because they cannot distinguish words (in fact, they occur in complementary distribution).
English speakers treat them as the same sound, but they are different: the first is aspirated and the
h
second is unaspirated (plain). Plain [p] also occurs as the p in cap [k æ p], or the second p in paper
[p eI.p ]. Chinese languages treat these two phones differently; for example in Mandarin, [p] (written
h
b in Pinyin) and [p ] (written p) contrast phonemically. Many Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi-
h
e
Urdu, also write the two phones differently and treat them as completely distinct phonemes: [p] is
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