Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

The linguistics encyclopedia 462
(a) stress phonemes, of which there are four: strong= reduced strong=
medium= weak= , i.e. zero, hence no diacritic mark: all four are illustrated in
élevàtor-ôperàtor;
(b) pitch phonemes, of which there are also four: low (1), mid (2), high (3), extra-high
(4), illustrated in:
(c) juncture phonemes, of which there are at least three: external open, internal close,
internal open, illustrated in nitrate, which has external open junctures before /n/ and
after the second /t/ and internal close junctures between /n/, /ai/, /t/, /r/, /ei/, and /t/, and
in night-rate, which has external open junctures and internal close junctures as in
nitrate except that it has an internal open juncture between the first /t/ and /r/ instead
of an internal close juncture. An internal open juncture is customarily indicated as /+/,
hence an alternative name plus juncture.
Some, not all, post-Bloomfieldians operate with three additional junctures, i.e. /ll/, called
double bar, /#/, double cross, and /l/, single bar. These are used in reference to
intonational directions, i.e. upturn, downturn, and level (= neither upturn nor
downturn), respectively. Suprasegmental phonemes are said not to be linearly placed but
to occur spread over, or superimposed on, a segmental phoneme or phonemes, but this
is obviously not the case with juncture phonemes though their effects themselves are
phonetically manifested over segmental phonemes adjacent to the juncture phonemes.
Daniel Jones maintained that the phoneme is a phonetic conception, and rejected the
separation of phonemics from phonetics, asserting that the two are part and parcel of a
single science called phonetics. His use of the term ‘phonemic’, as in ‘phonemic
grouping’ and other expressions, pertains to the phoneme, not to phonemics, a term
which he does not use for his own phoneme theory. It is neither clear nor certain how
much the latter benefited from the former. Jones’ phoneme theory was intended for
various practical purposes including foreign pronunciation teaching and devising of
orthographies, not for theoretical purposes. He excluded any reference to meaning in his
so-called physical definition of a phoneme as a family of phonetically similar and
complementarily distributed sounds—which he called members or allophones of
phonemes—within a word in an idiolect. Jones meant by an idiolect here ‘the speech of
one individual pronouncing in a definite and consistent style’.
This concept of the phoneme is strikingly similar, if not identical in detail, to that
entertained by post-Bloomfieldians, who apply other criteria as well. Like post-
Bloomfieldians, Jones admitted recourse to meaning as an expedient to establishing the
phonemes of a language. He said that sounds occurring in an identical context belong
necessarily to different phonemes and that it is phonemes which distinguish different
words, not allophones of the same phoneme. He opined that a phoneme is what is stated
in his definition of it and what a phoneme does is to distinguish words. Note, as Jones
himself stressed, that it is a necessary corollary of his definition of the phoneme that
different sounds occurring in an identical context must be members of different
phonemes. A pair of words which are distinguished from each other through a difference