The Phoneme 'T

T HERE STILL exists among many linguists, and especially among persons who, while not linguists, are peripherally concerned with linguistics, the idea that phonemics is some kind of mentalistic or psychological exercise, and has little if anything to do with science. This idea, of course, is completely mistaken, for phonemics, like every other part of linguistics, is a rigidly objective analytical procedure, by means of which phonetic data are classified and made usable in more complex procedures such as morphology. It is my purpose to present as a model of such procedure an analysis of those phonetic phenomena in my speech which are summarized by a statement of the form 'The phoneme /t/ consists of the following allophones: .. .' This particular phoneme is chosen because it presents a wide range of phonetic values and because it necessitates particularly rigid, and completely objective, application of the guiding principles. These principles must be briefly set forth in order to make the argument comprehensible. 2. By means of data obtained from various sciences other than linguistics, such as physics and physiology and their branches, we know that certain organs of speech go through specific processes and produce specific noises; each of the components of a noise of this type can be called a SOUND-FEATURE. Sound-features are such effects as voicing, voicelessness, stop articulation, spirant articulation, affrication, aspiration, release, onset, etc. Fixed kinds of combinations of these sound-features are used in language; these combinations or summations are called SOUND-TYPES. Thus the aspirated [t'] of tip is a sound-type, consisting of the sound-features of stopness, alveolarness, voicelessness, fortisness, aspirated release. The study of sound-types is the first part of linguistics-PHONETICS. The next step is to group sound-types into larger classes. This is done by a process which may be called COLLOCATION: collocation examines the possible combinations of the elements being studied, by means of SELECTION and JUXTAPOSITION: selection states which elements may occur in a given situation; juxtaposition indicates the sequences and combinations found. The study of the collocation of sound-types is PHONEMICS; a formal definition may be given: Phonemics is the branch of general phonology dealing

Linguistics · Theoretical linguistics · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Phonetics and Phonology Research · History · Philosophy

• Issues in phonological theory

  J Donald Ragsdale•Quarterly Journal of Speech•1967

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• The /t

  Open Access•Andre Malecot, Paul M Lloyd et al.•Lingua•1968

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