The allophones are said to be in complementary distribution because they never occur in the same context: [p] occurs after [s] while [ph] occurs in other places.
2.3 Phonemes (音素)

Phoneticians are concerned with how sounds differ in the way they are pronounced while phonologists are interested in the patterning of such sounds and the rules that underlie such variations.

pure / monophthong vowels

Vowels diphthongs
vowel glides
triphthongs
Jones: An Outline of English Phonetics (1918)
Black: IPA Red: English

We can now describe the English vowels in this way:
[] high front tense unrounded vowel [] high back lax rounded vowel [] mid central lax unrounded vowel [] low back lax rounded vowel


basic unit of language they are meaning distinguishing and have contrastive property.

How to identify phonemes: if the substitution of one sound for another in a word results in a change in meaning, then these two sounds represent two different phonemes.

The word „phoneme‟ simply refers to a „unit of explicit sound contrast‟: the smallest segment of sound which can distinguish two words, that is to say, the essential property of a phoneme is that it functions contrastively.



1:A phonological unit of description in a language 2: contrastive in a language and therefore distinctive of meaning 3: abstract, not physical 4: marked with / /
/p/
[p] / [s] _____
[ph] elsewhere

This phenomenon of variation in the pronunciation of phonemes in different positions is called allophony or allophonic variation.
Hale Waihona Puke Phonological rules:


/v/ [f] /z/ [s] etc. The phonological rule for the examples: voiced fricative (affricate) voiceless / ____ voiceless Nasalization rule:

Languages differ in the selection of contrastive sounds.
In English, the distinction between aspirated [ph] and unaspirated [p] is not phonemic, but belong to the same phoneme /p/, such as peak and speak. In Chinese, however, the distinction between /p/ and /ph/ is phonemic, such as 拼 and 宾。
[-nasal] [+nasal] / ____ [+nasal]

Dentalization rule:
[-dental] [dental] / ____ [dental]

Velarization rule:
[-velar] [+velar] / ____ [+velar]

The distinction between phoneme (音素） and allophone（音位变体）: Substituting one phoneme for another will result in a word with a different meaning as well as different pronunciation, but substituting allophones only results in a different pronunciation of the same word.
Chapter Two
Speech Sounds
Phones, phonemes and allophones

The smallest discrete segment of sound in a stream of speech called a phone(音位） Technically, a phone is 1: a phonetic unit 2: not distinctive of meaning 3: physical as perceived 4: marked with { }

The word „phoneme‟ simply refers to a „unit of explicit sound contrast‟: the smallest segment of sound which can distinguish two words, that is to say, the essential property of a phoneme is that it functions contrastively.


2.3 Phone and Allophones




/p/ [p] : speak : /spi:k/ [ph] peak : /pi:k/ Phoneme is an abstract unit or sound type in human mind. One phoneme is usually realized by different versions in actual speech (in the mouth), and these different versions are described as “phone”. [p, ph] are two different phones and are variants of the phoneme /p/, so they are called the allophones of the phoneme /P/. Allophones refer to the variants of a phoneme and occur in complementary distribution.


Vowels The description of English vowels needs to fulfill four basic requirements:
the height of tongue raising (high, mid, low); the position of the highest part of the tongue (front, central, back); the length or tenseness of the vowel (tense vs. lax or long vs. short), and lip-rounding (rounded vs. unrounded).

basic unit of language they are meaning distinguishing and have contrastive property.

How to identify phonemes: if the substitution of one sound for another in a word results in a change in meaning, then these two sounds represent two different phonemes.