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The Phoneme

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Submitted By CatBackX
Words 1550
Pages 7
Meaningless sounds full of meaning
Diego Ramos
People happen to know what someone else means when they are talking; however, most of them do not comprehend what words are: how they take a role to become meaningful and how they can change. As a matter of fact, they can change in a total different word or just the way they are pronounced; thus, this is something that is related to the phoneme. The phoneme has material to talk about and throughout this work, one can see what the definition of what this one is; in addition, the phenomenon of the allophone is explained and treated; also, the way of how not understanding something can affect the way either to communicate or to express one’s self is seen. At the end, but not the least important, how an “insignificant sound” (as some people might say) can affect completely meaning of a word is mentioned, too. All of these topics has something to do with the phoneme and that is something that shall be taken into account in this essay. First, it would be convenient to define what a phoneme is, and that is why in this piece of work we have got three different definitions in order to summarise the basic ideas and points one can say about this term. In order to start defining, there is Skaderar’s definition: in Skandera’s definition, phonemes have a meaning in the speakers language competence and performance, and they are the smallest and distinctive unit in speech (Skandera & Burleigh, 2005, p. 31). At the same time, there is the definition given by Auroux and Wiegand which shows different aspects of it; here, the authors talk about the phoneme being an entity (as an issue that is not physical or psychological) and only able to be defined by its function. Moreover, they also describe in their work how different features were added to the definition of phoneme by the linguist Jacobson: aspects such as being a set of

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