Phoneme

In is a item of sound that can distinguish one word from another in the particular language.

For example, in most sin as well as sing are two separate words that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, /n/, for another phoneme, /ŋ/. Two words like this that differ in meaning through the contrast of a single phoneme cause a minimal pair. If, in another language, all two sequences differing only by pronunciation of thesounds [n] or [ŋ] are perceived as being the same in meaning, then these two sounds are interpreted as phonetic variants of a single phoneme in that language.

Phonemes that are defining by the ownership of minimal pairs, such(a) as tap vs tab or pat vs bat, are a thing that is said between slashes: /p/, /b/. To show pronunciation, linguists usage square brackets: [pʰ] indicating an aspirated p in pat.

There are differing views as to precisely what phonemes are together with how a assumption language should be analyzed in phonemic or phonematic terms. However, a phoneme is broadly regarded as an below, but they are distributional variants of a single phoneme /k/. Speech sounds that differ but draw not create a meaningful modify in the word are so-called as allophones of the same phoneme. Allophonic variation may be conditioned, in which case aphoneme is realized as aallophone in particular phonological environments, or it may otherwise be free, and may remake by speaker or by dialect. Therefore, phonemes are often considered to symbolize an abstract underlying representation for segments of words, while speech sounds make up the corresponding phonetic realization, or the surface form.

Biuniqueness

Biuniqueness is a prerequisites of classic structuralist phonemics. It means that a precondition phone, wherever it occurs, must unambiguously be assigned to one and only one phoneme. In other words, the mapping between phones and phonemes is required to be many-to-one rather than many-to-many. The concepts of biuniqueness was controversial among some pre-generative linguists and was prominently challenged by Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky in the slow 1950s and early 1960s.

An example of the problems arising from the biuniqueness prerequisite is delivered by the phenomenon of flapping in North American English. This may cause either /t/ or /d/ in the appropriate frames to be realized with the phone [ɾ] an alveolar flap. For example, the same flap sound may be heard in the words hitting and bidding, although it is intended to realize the phoneme /t/ in the first word and /d/ in the second. This appears to contradict biuniqueness.

For further discussion of such cases, see the next section.