Allophones

johnny_ultimate

Hey
Doing a college assignment at the moment for an intro to linguistics at the moment. I'm stuck on two problems, basically related to allophones - along the lines of whether and [z] are allophones in Spanish / [t] in Tongan.
I can work out why one sound comes where it does (usually through voiceless/voiced sounds following) but am struggling to come up with whether these sounds are simply seperate phonemes or allophones...

So, a complicated way of asking : can allophones actually be seperate sounds rather than just nasalised versions of a phoneme (the only concrete example of allophones our lecturer has described to us thus far)?

Phosphorus

Hi,
Allophones are basically one phoneme realised as different sounds.
A typical example from English:
Let's take two words and their pronunciation

input form output
spil -> /spil/ -> [sp[FONT=&quot]ɪl][/FONT]
pill -> /pil/ -> [ph[FONT=&quot]ɪl]*
[/FONT]
[ph]* and [p] are allophones as they are only different realisations of phoneme /p/. (In the beginning of a voiced syllable, /p/ is realised as aspirated stop while everywhere else it is realised as non-aspirated stop.)
So in order to figure out whether some sounds are allophones you have to figure out whether they appear in the same context because the realisation of allophones is context dependent, i.e. if they can be found in the same context, they are not allophones.
I hope it helps...

*) edit: the 'h' should have been in superscript to mark aspiration... sorry, but I can't get it to display correctly.

P.S.: As another example... (voiced bilabial stop) and /FONT][FONT=&quot]ß[/FONT][FONT=Verdana (voiced bilabial fricative) are allophones in Spanish, so yes, allophones can be separate sounds, however, there is obviously a connection between them (in this case they are both obstruents and share place of articulation and voicing).

quazzy

Phosphorus wrote:

Hi,
Allophones are basically one phoneme realised as different sounds.
A typical example from English:
Let's take two words and their pronunciation

input form output
spil -> /spil/ -> [sp[FONT=&quot]ɪl][/FONT]
pill -> /pil/ -> [ph[FONT=&quot]ɪl]*
[/FONT]
[ph]* and [p] are allophones as they are only different realisations of phoneme /p/. (In the beginning of a voiced syllable, /p/ is realised as aspirated stop while everywhere else it is realised as non-aspirated stop.)
So in order to figure out whether some sounds are allophones you have to figure out whether they appear in the same context because the realisation of allophones is context dependent, i.e. if they can be found in the same context, they are not allophones.
I hope it helps...

*) edit: the 'h' should have been in superscript to mark aspiration... sorry, but I can't get it to display correctly.

P.S.: As another example... (voiced bilabial stop) and /FONT][FONT=&quot]ß[/FONT][FONT=Verdana (voiced bilabial fricative) are allophones in Spanish, so yes, allophones can be separate sounds, however, there is obviously a connection between them (in this case they are both obstruents and share place of articulation and voicing).

If there was an award for best 1st post on boards I nominate you.

Welcome.

Enjoy your stay

Q

johnny_ultimate

quazzy wrote:

If there was an award for best 1st post on boards I nominate you.

Welcome.

Enjoy your stay

Q

Agreed. Thanks for the help, mysterious stranger! But for some reason I doubt we shall ever see him/her again...

Phosphorus

quazzy wrote:

If there was an award for best 1st post on boards I nominate you.

Welcome.

Enjoy your stay

Q

Thanks for the warm welcome and compliment:)

johnny_ultimate wrote:

Agreed. Thanks for the help, mysterious stranger! But for some reason I doubt we shall ever see him/her again...

You are very welcome indeed. And no worries, you can be quite sure I will stick around for a while. I am a regular reader of these forums for quite some time now, although I haven't contributed much yet.
But since Linguistics is an area where I can actually help (at least sometimes )... here I am.

Faith

Indeed, welcome! Looks like you know your stuff .

Flashraziel

Good luck in LC101 Johnny Ultimate. I'm in the class too. Hope I did well on that assignment. Wasn't too bad really.