English Phonology

 

In the vast majority of cases, applying our phoneme tests will provideresults in keeping with native speakers’ intuitions about which soundsbelong together; very often, as we have seen, allophones of a singlephoneme will not in fact be distinguishable for a native speaker at all,without a certain amount of phonetic training. However, there are somecases where sticking to those tests too rigidly can have quite the oppositeconsequence.

 

One of the best-known and most obvious examples of this kind inEnglish involves [h] and [ŋ]. The minimal pairs in (5.1) show that [h]contrasts with a number of English consonant phonemes word-initially;but there is no minimal pair for [ŋ]. Conversely, in word-final position,it is straightforward to find contrasts for [ŋ], as in rang, ran, ram, rat, rack,rag, rap, rash; but there is no equivalent minimal pair for [h]. The gener-alisation extractable from this is that [h] appears only before a stressedvowel (or at the beginning of a syllable; see Chapter 9), as in hat, ahead,apprehensive, vehicular (but not vehicle, where <h> appears in the spelling,but there is no [h], as the stress here falls on the first vowel). On the otherhand, [ŋ] is not permissible syllable-initially: it can appear only at theend of a syllable, either alone, as in rang, hanger, or before a velar plosive,either [k] or [g], as in rink, stinker, finger, stronger.

The previous section dealt with an exception to the criterion ofpredictability of occurrence: two sounds which are in complementary distribution are normally assigned to a single phoneme, but wherethis would conflict with phonetic similarity (and with native speakers’intuitions), it is appropriate to set up two distinct phonemes and seek analternative explanation for the complementarity, in terms of defectivedistributions. In this section, we turn to an exception to the other maincriterion for allophony, invariance of meaning.

 

When one sound is substituted for another and no meaning differencearises, we are dealing with two allophones of the same phoneme. AnEnglish speaker who produces a dark [l] in initial position may beregarded as having an unfamiliar accent, or some sort of minor speechimpediment, but there is little danger that light pronounced with initial[l] is going to be mistaken for another word entirely.

This second type of free variation can also be seen as constituting the tipof a much larger theoretical iceberg. In the [ε]conomic – [i]conomic cases,two otherwise contrastive sounds are both possible in a single word. Thecontrast between two phonemes may also be interrupted more system-atically, in a particular phonological context; in this case, rather than thetwo phonemes being equally possible alternatives, we find some formintermediate between the two.