LinguisticsLesson 3 of 4 in the course Phonology

Allophones: Phonemic Variation, Distribution, and Transcription

5 flashcards · 5 quiz questions · 5 match pairs · 5 fill-in sentences · English

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Summary

This lesson introduces the relationship between phonemes and the sounds speakers actually pronounce. Understanding allophones helps explain why a sound can vary without changing a word’s identity.

A phone is a speech sound considered as a concrete spoken event. A phoneme is an abstract sound category that can distinguish meaning in a particular language. An allophone is one of the possible phones used to pronounce a single phoneme in that language.

All flashcards

What is the difference between a phoneme and a phone?
A phoneme is an abstract sound category in a language, while a phone is a concrete speech sound. A phoneme may have more than one phone as its realization.
Define allophone.
An allophone is one of the possible phones used to pronounce a particular phoneme in a language. Allophones generally do not distinguish word meaning from one another in that language.
What are complementary allophones?
They are variants of one phoneme that occur in different phonetic contexts and are not normally interchangeable in those contexts.
What is free variation?
Free variation occurs when more than one allophone can appear in the same context without changing the word’s meaning; speaker habit or preference may influence the choice.
What is an allotone?
An allotone is a tonal allophone. The neutral tone in Standard Mandarin is an example.

Quiz questions

  1. Which description best defines an allophone?Answer: A phone that realizes a phoneme in a particular language.
  2. Which notation typically represents a phone rather than a phoneme?Answer: [tʰ]
  3. What does the elsewhere condition identify in an analysis of allophones?Answer: The variant used when no more specific phonological rule applies.
  4. In phonology, what can the archiphoneme /N/ represent?Answer: A nasal category with realizations such as [m], [n], and [ŋ].
  5. Why can [d] and [ð] be allophones in Spanish but distinguish words in English?Answer: Their phonological status depends on whether the sounds distinguish meaning in each language.

Based on the Wikipedia article Allophone, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Adapted into a summary, flashcards and quizzes.

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