Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For other uses, see Allophone (disambiguation). This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2010)
Diagram of basic procedure to determine whether two sounds are allophones In phonology, an allophone English pronunciation: /lfon/ (from the Greek: , llos, "other" and , phn, "voice, sound") is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds (or phones) used to pronounce a single phoneme.[1] For example, [p] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language. Although a phoneme's allophones are all alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable. Changing the allophone used by native speakers for a given phoneme in a specific context usually will not change the meaning of a word but the result may sound non-native or unintelligible. Speakers of a given language usually perceive one phoneme in their language as a single distinctive sound in that language and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variations used to pronounce single phonemes.[2][3]
Contents
[hide]
1 Complementary and free-variant allophones 2 Allotone 3 Examples in English vs. other languages o 3.1 Allophony of "v-w" in Hindi-Urdu 4 Representing a phoneme with an allophone 5 See also 6 References 7 External links
Allotone
A tonic allophone is sometimes called an allotone, for example in the neutral tone of Mandarin.
Aspiration strong explosion of breath. In English a voiceless plosive that is p, t or k is aspirated whenever it stands as the only consonant at the beginning of the stressed syllable or of the first, stressed or unstressed, syllable in a word.
Nasal plosion In English a plosive (/p, t, k, b, d, /) has nasal plosion when it is followed by nasal, inside a word or across word boundary. Partial devoicing of sonorants In English sonorants (/j, w, l, r, m, n, /) are partially devoiced when they follow a voiceless sound within the same syllable. Complete devoicing of sonorants In English a sonorant is completely devoiced when it follows an aspirated plosive (/p, t, k/). Partial devoicing of obstruents In English, a voiced obstruent is partially devoiced next to a pause or next to a voiceless sound, inside a word or across its boundary. Retraction in English /t, d, n, l/ are retracted before /r/.
Because the choice of allophone is seldom under conscious control, people may not realize they exist. English speakers may be unaware of the differences among six allophones of the phoneme /t/, namely unreleased [ t] as in cat, aspirated [t] as in top, glottalized [] as in button, flapped [] as in American English water, nasalized flapped as in winter, and none of the above [t] as in stop. However, they may become aware of the differences if, for example, they contrast the pronunciations of the following words:
Night rate: unreleased [nt.et] (without word space between . and ) Nitrate: aspirated [na.tet] or retracted [na.tet]
If a flame is held before the lips while these words are spoken, it flickers more during aspirated nitrate than during unaspirated night rate. The difference can also be felt by holding the hand in front of the lips. For a Mandarin speaker, to whom /t/ and /t/ are separate phonemes, the English distinction is much more obvious than it is to the English speaker who has learned since childhood to ignore it. Allophones of English /l/ may be noticed if the 'light' [l] of leaf [lif] is contrasted with the 'dark' [] of feel [fi]. Again, this difference is much more obvious to a Turkish speaker, for whom /l/ and // are separate phonemes, than to an English speaker, for whom they are allophones of a single phoneme.