Phones, phonemes and allophones.

The terminology we will be dealing with today may strike you as really complicated. This is always the case with abstract units that you cannot see or touch. I've made every effort for the text to be simple so don't give up before you even try understanding it.

To get down to basics: A phonological analysis involve two levels of representation - a concrete/phonetic representation (on the concrete level we describe what speech sounds there are) and an abstract/underlying one (on the abstract level we recognise the differences between elements - the contrastive function).

Phone is a speech sound as it is without taking into consideration it's function in a given language. It's a representation on the phonetic level and is a phonetic unit.

Phoneme, however, is a representation of a speech sound and it's an abstractive unit. It is the smallest contrastive linguistic unit that is capable of bringing about a change of meaning. In a word ''rat'' - we have 3 phonemes (remember: representations of speech sounds): /r/, /a/, /t/. In a word ''sat' we also have 3 phonemes: /s/, /a/, /t/. There is only one phoneme difference in the words above (/r/ - /s/). This phoneme brings about the change of meaning because surely the meaning changes depending on whether we pronounce /r/ or /s/ as the first speech sound of the given word. Pairs such as 'rat' - 'sat', 'pot' - 'tot', 'car' - 'far' and many others are pairs differing in terms of only one phoneme are called 'minimal pairs' and the contrast between the two words in each pair is called 'minimal contrast'. I'm sure you can think of many examples of minimal pairs and the process of finding them is refered to as 'commutation process'.

Sometimes we find various realisations of the same phoneme and these are called allophones. For example there are two types of /l/ in English. One is the dark 'l' and the other is the light /l/. The light /l/ always occurs at the begining of a word and the dark /l/ can be found in the middle or at the end of the word. They differ slightly in terms the way we pronounce them so we are surely dealing here with the different values of consonants but they are not different phonemes because they do never bring a change of meaning. In the word 'lull' for instance we have both - the light /l/ is first and the dark /l/ is second. If we pronounce them the other way round, the word may sound odd to a native English speaker, but will be still understood as 'lull' - no change of meaning takes place. Allophones occur consistently in different words or in different positions in a word. They are in 'complementary distribution' - they don't contrast with each other. In the case of phonemes we are dealing with 'parallel distribution' - they may contrast in one place in a word.

To sum up: If we concentrate on the underlying representation of a speech sound - it is a phoneme, but on the phonetic level - a phone. When a speech sound has been classified as realisation of a given phoneme we refer to it as an allophone of this phoneme.