What are Phonemes?

English Stops Continued

The facts thus far about the data that we've been looking at are the following:

The "p" sound in the data is pronounced in three different ways.
This difference in pronunciation is not random, but predictable, depending upon where the "p" sound occurs in the word:

Beginning of the word
End of the word
Anywhere except at the beginning or the end

It is important to note that the places in which the different pronunciations occur are unique, and do not overlap. That is, you never find at the end of the word, or at the beginning of the word, or in either place.

Since these different pronunciations never appear at the same place in words, they are said to be in complementary distribution.

The Phoneme

This brings us to the concept of the phoneme. A phoneme is a mental representation of a sound that has predictable variants. Each of the variants of that sound is called an allophone.

For example, in the case of the English stops, the sounds , , and are all predictable variants of one sound. They are in complementary distribution, as discussed above. Therefore, they must all be allophones of a phoneme.

How do we represent this phoneme? For reasons which will become clearer in later lessons, the phoneme is represented by the sound which has the broadest distribution, or occurs in the most places. Since and can only appear at the beginning or end, and appears everywhere else, has the widest distribution.

Therefore, the phoneme is . The // indicates that the representation is a phoneme, not a single sound.

Truth, Justice and the Linguistic Way

Still confused? Ok, imagine Clark Kent and Superman. We know that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person, right? Each persona is a variant of a single person, even though they look and act differently.

Even if we didn't know they were the same person, we could figure it out (because we're smarter than Lois and Jimmy) by looking at the different contexts in which we see Clark Kent and Superman. Here are the contexts we find Clark Kent:

On the trail of a story
In the supermarket
Buying a new suit for a date with Lois
etc.

Clark Kent shows up during contexts of being a reporter, being the owner of a refrigerator, being a suitor for Lois, etc. Now what about Superman:

The world is going to explode in 5 seconds
Jimmy is being held captive by Braniac
etc.

So Superman appears only in the context of being a hero.

In other words, Clark Kent and Superman never appear at the same in the same place in the same context. This means that they are in complementary distribution.

Since they are in complementary distribution, if they were sounds, they would be allophones of the same phoneme.

Which is the phoneme, Clark Kent or Superman? Well, since Superman only appears in the context of being a hero, Clark Kent has the wider distribution. Therefore, the phoneme is /Clark Kent/.