Description of Phoneme, Phone, Allophone and Morpheme

Description of Phoneme, Phone, Allophone and Morpheme!!!!

Phoneme 


A phoneme is a basic element of a spoken language or dialect, from which words in that language or dialect are analyzed as being built up. The phoneme is defined by the International Phonetic Association as "the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances".
Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. However a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech sounds (phones) which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the "k" sounds in the words kit and skill are not identical but they are perceived as the same sound by speakers of the language, and are therefore both considered to represent a single phoneme, /k/. Different speech sounds representing the same phoneme are known as allophones. Thus phonemes are often considered to provide an underlying representation for words, while speech sounds make up the corresponding surface form.

Phone

It is a speech sound or gesture considered a physical event without regard to its place in the phonology of a language. It is a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties. It is the basic unit revealed via phonetic speech analysis

Allophone

 It is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds (or phones) used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, [pʰ] (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. Native 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.

Morpheme

The word is the basic unit which relates the grammar of a language to its vocabulary. Words have internal structure which indicates their grammatical identity (e.g. that the word is plural, or past tense) and their lexical identity (e.g. that the word unhappiness is a noun with negative meaning referring to emotions).  Words are composed of morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning. Some words consist of just one morpheme; some consist of several.

We can easily recognise such constructions as mats, artists, artistic. national, childishness, unmoved, denationalization,  highway, footpath as words. Difficulty arises when we try to define these constructions - but all the same they can be recognised. They have meaning which is independent of the meaning of other words. They convey the meaning in the same way as the following words: Sky, water, hill, cousin, mango, walk, sew, autumn and tap.

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