April McMahon

THE PHONEME 15In other cases, two sounds which phoneticians can equally easily tellapart will be regarded as the same by native speakers. For instance, saythe phrase kitchen cupboard to yourself, and think about the first sounds ofthe two words. Despite the difference in spelling (another case whereorthography, as we saw also in the last chapter, is not an entirely reliableguide to the sounds of a language), native speakers will tend to think ofthose initial consonants as the same – both are [k]s. However, if you saythe phrase several times, slowly, and think uncharacteristically carefullyabout whether your articulators are doing the same at the beginning ofboth words, you will find that there is a discernible difference. For thefirst sound in kitchen, your tongue will be raised towards the roof of yourmouth, further forward than for the beginning of cupboard; and for kitchen,your lips will be spread apart a little more too, while for cupboard yourmouth will be more open. Unless you are from Australia or New Zealand(for reasons we shall discover in Chapter 8), this difference is evenclearer from the phrase car keys, this time with the first word having theinitial sound produced further back in the mouth, and the second furtherforward.In IPA terms, these can be transcribed as [k], the cupboard sound, and[c], the kitchen one. However, in English [k] and [c] do not signal differentmeanings as [k] and [t] do in call versus tall; instead, we can alwayspredict that [k] will appear before one set of vowels, which we call backvowels, like the [] of cupboard or the [ɑ] a Southern British Englishspeaker has in car, while [c] appears before front vowels, like the [I] ofkitchen or the [i] in Southern British English keys. Typically, speakerscontrol predictable differences of this type automatically and subconsciously,and sometimes resist any suggestion that the sounds involved,like [k] and [c] in English, are different at all, requiring uncharacteristicallyclose and persistent listening to tell the two apart. The differencebetween [k] and [c] in English is redundant; in phonological terms, thismeans the difference arises automatically in different contexts, but doesnot convey any new information.Returning to our orthographic analogy, recall that every instance of ahand-written a or A will be different from every other instance, evenproduced by the same person. In just the same way, the same speakerproducing the same words (say, multiple repetitions of kitchen cupboard )will produce minutely different instances of [k] and [c]. However, ahierarchical organisation of these variants can be made: in terms ofspelling, we can characterise variants as belonging to the lower-case orcapital set, and those in turn as realisations of the abstract grapheme. The subclasses have a consistent and predictable distribution, withupper-case at the beginnings of proper nouns and sentences, and lower-