Phoneme (Word Sounds)

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

Share
Pin
Email

Getty Images
 Languages
English Grammar
o Glossary of Key Terms
o Using Words Correctly
o Writing Tips & Advice
o Sentence Structures
o Rhetoric & Style
o Punctuation & Mechanics
o Developing Effective Paragraphs
o Developing Effective Essays
English as a Second Language
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Mandarin
by Richard Nordquist
Updated May 02, 2017

In linguistics, a phoneme is the smallest sound unit in a language that is capable of

conveying a distinct meaning, such as the s of sing and the r of ring.
Adjective: phonemic.

Phonemes are language specific. In other words, phonemes that are functionally distinct
in English (for example, /b/ and /p/) may not be so in another language. (Phonemes are
customarily written between slashes, thus /b/ and /p/.) Different languages have
different phonemes.

See Examples and Observations below. Also see:

Allophone
Alternation
Arbitrariness
Connected Speech
 Digraph
Free Variation

Etymology
From the Greek, "sound"

EXAMPLES AND OBSERVATIONS

"The central concept in phonology is the phoneme, which is a distinctive

category of sounds that all the native speakers of a language or dialect perceive as
more or less the same. . . . [A]lthough the two [k] sounds in kicked are not
identical--the first one is pronounced with more aspiration than the second--they
are heard as two instances of [k] nonetheless. . . . Since phonemes are categories
rather than actual sounds, they are not tangible things; instead, they are abstract,
theoretical types or groups that are only psychologically real. (In other words, we
cannot hear phonemes, but we assume they exist because of how the sounds in
languages pattern as they are used by speakers.)"
(Thomas E. Murray, The Structure of English: Phonetics, Phonology,
Morphology. Allyn and Bacon, 1995)

"Two points need to be stressed: (1) the most important property of

a phoneme is that it contrasts with the other phonemes in the system, and
hence (2) we can only speak of the phoneme of some particular speech variety (a
particular accentof a particular language). Languages differ in the number of
phonemes they distinguish . . ., but every valid word in every language necessarily
consists of some permissible sequence of that language's phonemes."
(R.L. Trask, A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. Routledge, 2004)

An Alphabetical Analogy: Phonemes and Allophones

"The concepts of phoneme and allophone become clearer by analogy with the
letters of the alphabet. We recognize that a symbol is a despite considerable
variations in size, colour, and (to a certain extent) shape. The representation of
the letter a is affected in handwriting by the preceding or following letters to
which it is joined. Writers may form the letter idiosyncratically and may vary
their writing according to whether they are tired or in a hurry or nervous. The
variants in the visual representations are analogous to the allophones of a
phoneme, and what is distinctive in contrast to other alphabetic letters is
analogous to the phoneme."
(Sidney Greenbaum, The Oxford English Grammar. Oxford University Press,
1996)
Differences Between Members of a Phoneme
"We cannot rely on the spelling to tell us whether two sounds are members of
different phonemes. For example, . . . the words key and car begin with what we
can regard as the same sound, despite the fact that one is spelled with the
letter k and the other with c. But in this case, the two sounds are not exactly the
same. . . . If you whisper just the first consonants in these two words, you can
probably hear the difference, and you may be able to feel that your tongue
 touches the roof of the mouth in a different place for each word. This example
shows that there may be very subtle differences between members of a phoneme.
The sounds at the beginning of key and car are slightly different, but it is not a
difference that changes the meaning of a word in English. They are both
members of the same phoneme."
(Peter Ladefoged and Keith Johnson, A Course in Phonetics, 6th ed. Wadsworth,
2011)

Pronunciation: FO-neem

allophone (word sounds)

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms
Share
Pin
Email
 Examples of five allophones of the phoneme /t/ in General American English.

Languages
English Grammar
o Glossary of Key Terms
o Using Words Correctly
o Writing Tips & Advice
o Sentence Structures
o Rhetoric & Style
o Punctuation & Mechanics
o Developing Effective Paragraphs
o Developing Effective Essays
English as a Second Language
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Mandarin
by Richard Nordquist
Updated April 25, 2017

In linguistics, an allophone is an audibly distinct variant of a phoneme, such as the

different pronunciations of the t sound in tar and star. Adjective: allophonic.

Substituting one allophone for another allophone of the same phoneme doesn't lead to a
different word, just a different pronunciation of the same word. For this reason,
allophones are said to be noncontrastive.

Etymology
From the Greek, "other" + "sound"

EXAMPLES AND OBSERVATIONS

 "[E]very speech sound we utter is an allophone of some phoneme and can be
grouped together with other phonetically similar sounds." (William O'Grady, et
al., Contemporary Linguistics. Bedford, 2001)
"The allophones of a phoneme form a set of sounds that (1) do not change
the meaning of a word, (2) are all very similar to one another, and (3) occur in
phonetic contexts different from one anotherfor example, syllable initial as
opposed to syllable final. The differences between allophones can be stated in
terms of phonological rules." (Peter Ladefoged and Keith Johnson, A Course in
Phonetics, 6th ed. Wadsworth, 2011)

DIFFERENT RELATIONSHIPS, DIFFERENT SOUNDS

"Many allophones, that is actual articulations, are possible for any phoneme of a
language, depending on individual people's pronunciation, but the main allophones of
any particular language are conditioned by their relationship to the surrounding sounds.

Thus in standard English the /l/ phoneme has a clear sound when it precedes a vowel
(as in listen or fall in); a somewhat devoiced sound when preceded by a voiceless plosive
(as in please, clue), and a dark sound when it occurs word-finally after a vowel (as in fall
down) or when it is syllabic (as in muddle)." (Sylvia Chalker and Edmund
Weiner, Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar.

Oxford University Press, 1998)

ALLOPHONES VS. PHONEMES

"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 constantit 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."
(Thomas Murray, The Structure of English.

Allyn and Bacon, 1995)

AN INFINITE NUMBER OF ALLOPHONES

"[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." (Paul Skandera and Peter Burleigh, A Manual of English Phonetics and
Phonology. Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005)

Pronunciation: AL-eh-fon

alternation (language)
Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms
Share
Pin
Email

An example of non-recurrent alternation: no other morphemes in English display an identical

variation.
 Languages
English Grammar
o Glossary of Key Terms
o Using Words Correctly
o Writing Tips & Advice
o Sentence Structures
o Rhetoric & Style
o Punctuation & Mechanics
o Developing Effective Paragraphs
o Developing Effective Essays
English as a Second Language
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Mandarin
by Richard Nordquist
Updated November 29, 2016

DEFINITION

In linguistics, alternation is a a variation in the form and/or sound of a word or word

part. (Alternation is equivalent to allomorphy in morphology.) Also known
as alternance.

A form involved in an alternation is called an alternant. The customary symbol for

alternation is ~.

American linguist Leonard Bloomfield defined an automatic alternation as one that's

"determined by the phonemes of the accompanying forms" ("A Set of Postulates for the
Science of Language," 1926).
An alternation that affects only some morphemes of a particular phonological form is
called non-automatic or non-recurrent alternation.

See Examples and Observations below. Also see:

Allomorph
Free Variation
Gradability
Inflection and Inflectional Morphology
Phonetics
Phonology
Pronunciation
Suppletion

EXAMPLES AND OBSERVATIONS

"Certain English nouns ending in the consonant /f/ form their plurals with /v/
instead: leaf but leaves, knife but knives. We say that such items exhibit an /f/-
/v/ alternation. . . .

"A somewhat different alternation is found in related words like electric (which
ends in /k/) and electricity (which has /s/ instead of /k/ in the same position).

"More subtle is the three-way alternation occurring in the English plural marker.
The noun cat has plural cats, pronounced with /s/, but dog has plural dogs,
pronounced with /z/ (though again the spelling fails to show this), and fox has
plural foxes, with /z/ preceded by an extra vowel. This alternation is regular and
predictable; the choice among the three alternants (as they are called) is
determined by the nature of the preceding sound."
(R.L. Trask, Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed., ed. by Peter
Stockwell. Routledge, 2007)

From Phonology to Morphology

"[T]ypically, an allomorphic alternation makes the most sense phonologically if
one looks at an earlier stage of the language. Here are [five] striking examples:

foot feet
goose geese
tooth teeth
man men
mouse mice

In this list of words, the different vowels in the plural arose in Prehistoric
English. At that time, the plurals had an /i/ ending. English also had a
phonological rule (known by the German word umlaut) whereby vowels
preceding an /i/ became closer to the /i/ in pronunciation. At a later date, the
ending was lost. In terms of the phonology of Modern English, the current
 allomorphy is doubly senseless. First, there is no overt ending to explain the
alternation in the stem. Second, even if there were, English has lost the umlaut
rule. For example, we feel no pressure at all to turn Ann into xEnny when we add
the suffix -y/i/.

"Thus one big source of English allomorphy is the phonology of English. When
English loses the phonological rule, or when conditions in the word change so
that the rule no longer applies, the alternation often remains in place, and from
then on it is a rule of the morphology."
(Keith Denning, Brett Kessler, and William R. Leben, English Vocabulary
Elements, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2007)

Alternation and Voice

"The grammatical category of voice affords speakers some flexibility in viewing
thematic roles. Many languages allow an opposition between active
voice and passive voice. We can compare for example the English sentences in
6.90 below:

6.90a. Billy groomed the horses.6.90b. The horses were groomed by Billy.

In the active sentence 6.90a Billy, the agent, is subject and the horses,
the patient, is object. The passive version 6.90b, however, has the patient as
subject and the agent occurring in a prepositional phrase . . .. This is a typical
active-passive voice alternation: the passive sentence has a verb in a different
form--the past participle with the auxiliary verb be--and it allows the speaker a
different perspective on the situation described."
(John I. Saeed, Semantics, 3rd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

Alternation and Predicative Constructions

"According to Langacker (1987: 218), predicative adjectives have a relational
profile: they convey a quality, which functions as the landmark (lm) in the
reduction, that is associated with the entity denoted by the subject of
the utterance, which is the trajector (tr). Consequently, only elements with a
relational profile can be used as predicates. Applied to the discussion of
grounding elements, this entails that alternation with a predicative
construction is only available for elements that express deictic meanings but
profile the grounding relation, e.g. a known criminal - a criminal that is known,
and not for grounding predications, which have a nominal profile. As shown in
(5.28), comparative determiner units do not allow alternation with the
predicative construction, which suggests them to have a nominal rather than a
relational profile:

(5.28)
the same man *a man that is the same
another man *a man that is anotherthe other man *a man that is the other"
 Linguistic Arbitrariness
The Disconnect Between Form and Meaning of Words
Share
Pin
Email

"Consider the arbitrariness of linguistic rules," says Timothy Endicott. "The rule that the word
for tadpole in English is 'tadpole' is arbitrary (i.e., lacking in reason) in one sense, as linguists
have often remarked: there is no reason a language ought to use those phonemes arranged in that
order to refer to a tadpole" ("The Value of Vagueness," 2011). (Robert Trevis-Smith/Getty
Images)

Languages
English Grammar
o Glossary of Key Terms
o Using Words Correctly
o Writing Tips & Advice
o Sentence Structures
o Rhetoric & Style
o Punctuation & Mechanics
o Developing Effective Paragraphs
o Developing Effective Essays
English as a Second Language
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Mandarin
by Richard Nordquist
Updated April 18, 2017

In linguistics, arbitrariness is the absence of any natural or necessary connection

between a word's meaning and its sound or form. An antithesis to sound symbolism,
which does exhibit an apparent connection between sound and sense, arbitrariness is
one of the characteristics shared between all languages.

As R.L. Trask points out in "Language: The Basics," "the overwhelming presence of
arbitrariness in language is the chief reason it takes so long to learn the vocabulary of a
foreign language." This is largely due to confusion over similar-sounding words in a
secondary language.

Trask goes on to use the example of trying to guess the names of creatures in a foreign
language based on the sound and form alone, providing a list of Basque words "zaldi,
igel, txori, oilo, behi, sagu," which mean "horse, frog, bird, hen, cow, and mouse
respectively" then observing that arbitrariness is not unique to humans but instead
exists within all forms of communication.

LANGUAGE IS ARBITRARY

Therefore, all language can be assumed to be arbitrary, at least in this linguistic

definition of the word, despite occasional iconic characteristics. Instead of universal
rules and uniformity, then, language relies on associations of word meanings deriving
from cultural conventions.

To break this concept down further, linguist Edward Finegan wrote in "Language: Its
Structure and Use" about the difference between nonarbitrary and arbitrary semiotic
signs through an observation of a mother and son burning rice.

"Imagine a parent trying to catch a few minutes of the televised evening news while
preparing dinner," he writes. "Suddenly a strong aroma of burning rice wafts into the TV
room. This nonarbitrary sign will send the parent scurrying to salvage dinner."
The little boy, he posits, might also signal to his mother that the rice is burning by
saying something like "The rice is burning!" However, Finegan argues that while the
utterance is likely to elicit the same result of the mother checking on her cooking, the
words themselves are arbitrary it is "a set of facts about English (not about burning
rice) that enables the utterance to alert the parent," which makes the utterance an
arbitrary sign.

DIFFERENT LANGUAGES, DIFFERENT CONVENTIONS

As a result of languages' reliance on cultural conventions, different languages naturally

have different conventions, that can and do change which is part of the reason that
there are different languages in the first place!

Second language learners must, therefore, learn each new word individually as it's
generally impossible to guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word even when given
clues to the word's meaning.

Even linguistic rules are considered to be slightly arbitrary. However, Timothy Endicott
writes in "The Value of Vagueness" that "with all norms of language, there is a good
reason to have such norms for the use of words in such ways. That good reason is that it
is actually necessary to do so to achieve the coordination that enables communication,
self-expression and all the other priceless benefits of having a language."

connected speech
Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms
Share
Pin
Email
Robert Mitchum and Steven Keats in a scene from the film The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (1973).
See Examples and Observations below. (Michael Ochs Archives/Paramount/Getty Images)
 Languages
English Grammar
o Glossary of Key Terms
o Using Words Correctly
o Writing Tips & Advice
o Sentence Structures
o Rhetoric & Style
o Punctuation & Mechanics
o Developing Effective Paragraphs
o Developing Effective Essays
English as a Second Language
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Mandarin
by Richard Nordquist
Updated November 17, 2016

DEFINITION

Connected speech is spoken language that's used in a continuous sequence, as in

normal conversations. Also called connected discourse.

There is often a significant difference between the way words are pronouncedin isolation
and the way they are pronounced in the context of connected speech.

See Examples and Observations below. Also see:

Allegro Speech
Assimilation
Elision
Free Variation
 Intonation Phrase (IP)

Pause
Phonetics
Pronunciation
Rhythm
Segment and Suprasegmental
Slip of the Ear
Slurvian
Speech
Utterance
Wanna-Construction
Word Boundaries

EXAMPLES AND OBSERVATIONS

"Connected speech is more than just a string of individual target segments

joined together in series, since each segment is liable to influence the segments
that surround it. The precise form that these influences take is determined by the
particular language in question, and so the phonology of connected speech is part
of the phonology of the language that the child has to master . . .."
(Sara Howard, Bill Wells, and John Local, "Connected Speech." The Handbook of
Clinical Linguistics, ed. by Martin J. Ball, Michael R. Perkins, Nicole Muller, and
Sara Howard. Blackwell, 2008)
Stress Patterns in Connected Speech
"It would be wrong to imagine that the stress pattern is always fixed and
unchanging in English words. Stress position may vary for one of two reasons:
either as a result of the stress on other words occurring next to the word in
question, or because not all speakers agree on the placement of stress in some
words. The former case is an aspect of connected speech . . .: the main effect is
that the stress on a final-stressed compound tends to move to a
preceding syllable and change to secondary stress if the following word begins
with a strongly stressed syllable. Thus . . ."

bad-'tempered but a bad-tempered 'teacher

half-'timbered but a half-timbered 'house
heavy-'handed but a heavy-handed 'sentence"

(Peter Roach, English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course, 4th ed.
Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Word Recognition in Connected Speech

"Attempting to count the number of words in even a few seconds of a
conversation or radio broadcast in an unfamiliar language will quickly
demonstrate how difficult that task is because words run together in an utterance
 of any language.
Ifwordswereprintedwithoutspacesbetweenthemtheywouldbeprettytoughtoread.
As you recognize, sorting out the individual words would not be easy. Actually,
the task is even more difficult than the run-together words in the printed
sentence might suggest because the letters in the sentence above are discrete and
separated from one another, but the individual sound segments in spoken words
blend together into a continuous stream."
(Edward Finegan, Language: Its Structure and Use, 6th ed. Wadsworth, 2012)

Deletion of Sounds in Connected Speech

"In fast, connected speech some sounds may be be deleted by the speaker. For
example, the sound /t/ may be deleted between the words 'want to,' making the
pronunciation of 'want to' sound like "wnn.' (Note: the symbol represents a
very short, weak sound.) . . .

eg. ' . . . I don't wnn spend too much today.'"

(Susan Boyer, Understanding Spoken English: A Focus on Everyday Language

in Context, Book 1. Boyer Educational Resources, 2003)

Connected-Speech Processes
"There are some important points to remember about connected
speech processes [CSP]:

- They occur at the edges of words, since this is where words 'meet' in sentences.
- Importantly, connected speech processes are optional. . . .
- We can think of them affecting sounds at the phonemic level rather than
the allophonic level. When /t/ or /d/ or /h/ is elided, for example, we do not find
that a different allophone occurs; we simply find that the phoneme is lost
altogether.- Because CSPs affect phonemes, they may lead to confusions about
meaning . . .."

(Rachael-Anne Knight, Phonetics: A Coursebook. Cambridge University Press,

2012)

Connected Speech in the Film The Friends of Eddie Coyle

[Listen to this exchange on YouTube.]

Eddie Coyle: Count your . . . knuckles.

Jackie Brown: All of 'em?

Eddie Coyle: Count as many as you want. As many as you got, I got four more.
You know how I got those? I bought some stuff from a man. I knew his name. The
stuff was traced. The guy I bought it for, he's at MCI Walpole for 15 to 25. Still in
 there. But he had some friends. I got an extra set of knuckles. They put your hand
in a drawer then somebody kicks the drawer shut. Hurt like a bastard.

Jackie Brown: Jesus.

Eddie Coyle: What makes it hurt worse, what makes it hurt more is knowing
what's going to happen to you, you know? There you are, they just come up to you
and say, "Look. You made somebody mad. You made a big mistake and now
there's somebody doing time for it. There's nothing personal in it, you
understand, but it just has to be done. Now get your hand out there." You think
about not doing it, you know. When I was a kid in Sunday school, this nun, she
used to say, "Stick your hand out." I stick my hand out. Whap! She'd knock me
across the knuckles with a steel-edge ruler. So one day I says, when she told me,
"Stick your hand out," I says, "No." She whapped me right across the face with
the ruler. Same thing. They put your hand in a drawer, somebody kicks the
drawer shut. Ever hear bones breaking? Just like a man snapping a shingle. Hurts
like a bastard.
(Robert Mitchum and Steven Keats in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, 1973)

Definition and Examples of Digraphs in

English
Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms
Share
Pin
Email
 (Getty Images)

Languages
English Grammar
o Glossary of Key Terms
o Using Words Correctly
o Writing Tips & Advice
o Sentence Structures
o Rhetoric & Style
o Punctuation & Mechanics
o Developing Effective Paragraphs
o Developing Effective Essays
English as a Second Language
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Mandarin
by Richard Nordquist
Updated April 30, 2017

A digraph is a group of two successive letters that represent a single sound

(or phoneme).

Common vowel digraphs in English include ai (as

in rain), ay (day), ea (teach), ea (bread), ea (break), ee (free), ei (eight), ey (key), ie (pi
ece), oa (road), oo (book), oo (room), ow (slow), and ue (true).

Common consonant digraphs in English include ch (as

in church), ch (school), ng (king), ph (phone), sh (shoe), th (then), th (think),
and wh (wheel).

0:11

0:31

HOW TO SAY "DOCTOR" IN MANDARIN

See examples and observations below. Also see:

Consonant Cluster
Diphthong
Grapheme
Orthography
Phonetics
Phonotactics
Etymology
From the Greek, "twice writing"

EXAMPLES AND OBSERVATIONS

"What is excluded from the English alphabet are the several highly standardized
and frequently used digraphs of English, namely [ch, gh, ph, sh, th] and
occasionally [kh] and [wh] which play a very important role in the encoding
(writing) and decoding (reading) processes of [the] English language . . ..

"[F]rom the pedagogical and instructional perspective, the digraphs should be

given utmost attention in the teaching of almost all language skills of English
because of the proportionally large number of digraphs in relation to the 26
letters; they are approximately one-fourth of the core letters."
(E. Y. Odisho, Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English.
Gorgias, 2007)
"[T]he ch digraph found in the words: character, chorus, chauffeur, chute,
choir, chimp, and chain, have four different sounds respectively: k, sh, kw,
and ch."
(Roberta Heembrock, Why Kids Can't Spell. Rowman & Littlefield, 2008)

A Complicated System
"Some sounds can only be represented by digraphs, such as the 'sh' digraph in
'shoot' and the 'ay,' 'ai' and 'a-e' digraphs in 'say,' 'sail' and 'same.' Other sounds
are represented in some words by single letters and, usually less frequently in
others by digraphs: thus 'fan' and 'phantom' begin with the same phonemewhich
is written as one letter in the first and as two in the second of these two words.
This is a complicated system and probably, to young children at least, it may
seem a capricious and unpredictable one as well."
(T. Nunes and P. Bryant, Children's Reading and Spelling. Wiley-Blackwell,
2009)

Digraphs and the Spelling Process

"Although there is clear evidence that single letters may be units of orthographic
representation, there is also evidence that they are not the only orthographic
units. In their computational work on the spelling process, Houghton and Zorzi
(2003) proposed that the single or multiple letter sequences that correspond to
single phonemes are represented as single orthographic units . . .. Accordingly,
the six letters of the three-phoneme word 'wreath' would be represented by three
(digraph) units WR+EA+TH. whereas the six letters of the six-phoneme word
'strict' would be represented by six units S+T+R+I+C+T. Houghton and Zorzi's
arguments are computationally motivated because they found that this type of
representation improved both the accuracy and the plausibility of errors
produced by their connectionist simulation of single word spelling."
(Brenda Rapp and Simon Fischer-Baum, "Representation of Orthographic
Knowledge."
 The Oxford Handbook of Language Production, ed. by Matthew Goldrick et al.
Oxford University Press, 2014)

The -ed Spelling of the Past-Tense Marker

"Children find it difficult to learn a special spelling of a morpheme when that
spelling deviates from the one expected on the basis of other phonological or
graphic patterns. This is often the case with the English past tense morpheme,
helping to explain why children learn its spelling relatively slowly. . . . The oddity
of spelling /t/ and /d/ with [as in the words messed and called] helps to explain
why learning proceeds slowly in this case. A single consonant phoneme is more
often spelled with a single letter than with a digraph. When a two-letter
sequence is used to spell a single consonant sound, both letters are normally
consonants. These things make the spelling for /t/ and /d/ quite odd. The
spelling of the past tense marker is less odd when the past tense is /d/,
as hunted than when it is /d/ or /t/."
(Rebecca Treiman and Brett Kessler, How Children Learn to Write Words.
Oxford University Press, 2014)

Pronunciation: DI-graf

Free Variation in Phonetics

Share
Pin
Email
 Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Languages
English Grammar
o Glossary of Key Terms
o Using Words Correctly
o Writing Tips & Advice
o Sentence Structures
o Rhetoric & Style
o Punctuation & Mechanics
o Developing Effective Paragraphs
o Developing Effective Essays
English as a Second Language
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Mandarin
by Richard Nordquist
Updated March 22, 2017

In phonetics and phonology, free variation is an alternative pronunciation of a word (or

of a phoneme in a word) that doesn't affect the word's meaning.

Free variation is "free" in the sense that it doesn't result in a different word. As William
B. McGregor observes, "Absolutely free variation is rare. Usually there are reasons for it,
perhaps the speaker's dialect, perhaps the emphasis the speaker wants to put on the
word" (Linguistics: An Introduction, 2009).

COMMENTARY

"When the same speaker produces noticeably different pronunciations of the

word cat (e.g. by exploding or not exploding the final /t/), the different realisations of
the phonemes are said to be in free variation."

(Alan Cruttenden, Gimson's Pronunciation of English, 8th ed. Routledge, 2014)

FREE VARIATION IN CONTEXT

- "Sounds that are in free variation occur in the same context, and thus are not
predictable, but the difference between the two sounds does not change one word into
another. Truly free variation is rather hard to find. Humans are very good at picking up
distinctions in ways of speaking, and assigning meaning to them, so finding distinctions
that are truly unpredictable and that truly have no shade of difference in meaning is
rare."

(Elizabeth C. Zsiga, The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics and

Phonology. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

- "[F]ree variation, however infrequent, can be found between the realizations of

separate phonemes (phonemic free variation, as in [i] and [aI] of either), as well as
between the allophones of the same phoneme (allophonic free variation, as in [k] and
[k] of back)...
"For some speakers, [i] may be in free variation with [I] in final position (e.g. city [sIti,
sItI], happy [hpi, hpI]). The use of final unstressed [I] is most common to the south
of a line drawn west from Atlantic City to northern Missouri, thence southwest to New
Mexico."

(Mehmet Yavas, Applied English Phonology, 2nd ed.

Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

STRESSED AND UNSTRESSED SYLLABLES

"There can... be free variation between full and reduced vowels in

unstressed syllables, which also has to do with related morphemes. For example, the
word affixcan be a verb or a noun, and the form carries stress on the final syllable and
the latter on the initial one. But in actual speech, the initial vowel of the verb is actually
in free variation with schwa and the full vowel: /'fIks/ and /'fIks/, and this
unstressed full vowel is the same as that found in the initial syllable of the noun,
/'fIks/. This kind of alternation is probably due to the fact that both forms actually
occur, and they are instances of two lexical items that are not just formally but also
semantically closely related. Cognitively, when only one is actually evoked in a given
construction, both are probably activated nevertheless, and this is the likely source of
this free variation."

(Riitta Vlimaa-Blum, Cognitive Phonology in Construction Grammar: Analytic Tools

for Students of English. Walter de Gruyter, 2005)

EXTRAGRAMMATICAL FACTORS

"The fact that variation is 'free' does not imply that it is totally unpredictable, but only
that no grammatical principles govern the distribution of variants.

Nevertheless, a wide range of extragrammatical factors may affect the choice of one
variant over the other, including sociolinguistic variables (such as gender, age, and
class), and performance variables (such as speech style and tempo). Perhaps the most
important diagnostic of extragrammatical variables is that they affect the choice of
occurrence of one output in a stochastic way, rather than deterministically."

(Ren Kager, Optimality Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1999)