Page 155 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

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

‘broad’) transcription is used. However, when there are complementary allophones of a phoneme, so Notes
that the allophony is significant, things become more complicated. Often, if only one of the allophones
is simple to transcribe, in the sense of not requiring diacritics, then that representation is chosen for
the phoneme.
However, there may be several such allophones, or the linguist may prefer greater precision than this
allows. In such cases a common convention is to use the “elsewhere condition” to decide which
allophone will stand for the phoneme. The “elsewhere” allophone is the one that remains once the
conditions for the others are described by phonological rules. For example, English has both oral and
nasal allophones of its vowels. The pattern is that vowels are nasal only when preceding a nasal
consonant within the same syllable; elsewhere they’re oral. Therefore, by the “elsewhere” convention,
the oral allophones are considered basic; nasal vowels in English are considered to be allophones of
oral phonemes.
In other cases, an allophone may be chosen to represent its phoneme because it is more common in
the world’s languages than the other allophones, because it reflects the historical origin of the phoneme,
or because it gives a more balanced look to a chart of the phonemic inventory. In rare cases a linguist
may represent phonemes with abstract symbols, such as dingbats, so as not to privilege any one
allophone.
An allophonic rule is a phonological rule that indicates which allophone realizes a phoneme in a
given phonemic environment. In other words, an allophonic rule is a rule that converts the phonemes
in a phonemic transcription into the allophones of the corresponding phonetic transcription. Every
language has a set of allophonic rules.
In American English, the voiceless alveolar stop phoneme /t/ is realized as the alveolar flap allophone
[ ] when it is preceded by a sonorant phoneme other than an alveolar nasal or lateral, and, at the
same time, followed by an unstressed vowel phoneme.
J
/t/ → [ ] | /+ son - lat/ — /+ vwl - str/
J
[st Λ b] This linguistics article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Examples and Observations

• “Sounds that are merely phonetic variants of the same phoneme are allophones. Notice that
any two sounds of a given language represent either two allophones of the same phoneme (if
the sounds can be interchanged in words with no resulting change in meaning, such as the p’s
of pit and keep) or two different phonemes (if the sounds cannot be interchanged without a
resulting change in meaning, such as the m and s of milk and silk)....
“Now consider the word stop. If you say the word several times, you will probably notice that
sometimes the final /p/ contains more aspiration and sometimes, less. (In fact, if you end the
word with your lips together and do not release the /p/, it contains no aspiration at all.) Since
you are not pronouncing stop as part of a larger chunk of language that varies from utterance
to utterance (for 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 is likely to occur, so the allophones of/p/ must be in free variation.”
• “[E] very speech sound we utter is an allophone of some phoneme and can be grouped together
with other phonetically similar sounds.”
• “[T] he choice of one allophone rather than another may depend on such factors as
communicative situation, language variety, and social class. . . . [W]hen we consider the wide
range of possible realisations of any given phoneme (even by a single speaker), it becomes clear
that we owe the vast majority of allophones in free variation to idiolects or simply to chance,
and that the number of such allophones is virtually infinite.”

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 149