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The main business of the last chapter was the construction of rulesstating allophonic distributions. These rules in turn were based on theidentification of phonemes, for which we relied on the two fundamentaltools of predictability of occurrence and invariance of meaning: if twosounds occur in non-overlapping, predictable sets of contexts, and ifsubstituting one for the other does not make a semantic difference, thenthose two sounds must necessarily be allophones of a single phoneme.On the other hand, if those two sounds can occur in the same environments,producing different words, they belong to different phonemes.This diagnosis is confirmed by the commutation test, which involvesputting different sounds in a particular context, to see if minimal pairsresult. An example for English consonants is given in (1). |
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