Construct · 1 fields · 4 citations

phoneme: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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phoneme1 CONSTRUCTPhonemeBAUDOUIN · SOUND UNIT

A single standalone construct; nearby constructs are located against it in the Collider. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.

Linguistics

The smallest contrastive unit of speech sound in a language

The concept was developed by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski in the 1870s and 1880s at the Kazan school, who separated the physical speech sound from the smaller mental unit that speakers of a language treat as a single contrastive element. Nikolai Trubetzkoy systematized the idea in his 1939 Grundzüge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology), defining the phoneme as the smallest unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another within a given language. In English the difference between the sounds written p and b is phonemic because it separates pat from bat, whereas the extra puff of air on the p of pin but not the p of spin is not phonemic, since no English word pair depends on it, and such non-distinctive variants are called allophones of the same phoneme. As the founding unit of the field of phonology, the phoneme gives every spoken language a finite inventory, usually a few dozen, from which all of its words are assembled, and it is identified by the minimal-pair test, comparing two words that differ in exactly one sound and one meaning.[1][2][3][4]

Unit
A contrastive sound category of a specific language, one of a finite inventory of usually a few dozen
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified by the minimal-pair test and by patterns of complementary distribution among a language's speech sounds

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Nearby constructs

alphabet2 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, two constructssyntax3 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, three constructselement3 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, three constructs

References

  1. Baudouin de Courtenay, J. N. (1895). Versuch einer Theorie phonetischer Alternationen: Ein Capitel aus der Psychophonetik. Trübner.
  2. Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1939). Grundzüge der Phonologie. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 7.
  3. Twaddell, W. F. (1935). On defining the phoneme. Language, 11(1), 5–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/522070
  4. Dresher, B. E. (2011). The phoneme. In M. van Oostendorp, C. J. Ewen, E. Hume, & K. Rice (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology. Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444335262.wbctp0011

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