Theoretical Phonetics of the English Language

The phoneme, its definition, aspects and functions

• All the actual (реально существующие) speech sounds, pronounced by the speaker are, are positional variants or allophones of the phoneme that exist in a language.
• In English there are 20 vowel phonemes and 24 consonant phonemes.
• In Russian there are 6 vowel and 35 consonant phonemes.

The phoneme, its definition, aspects and functions

V.A. Vassilyev

The segmental phoneme is the smallest (i.e. further indivisible into smaller consecutive segments) language unit that exists in the speech of all the members of a given language community as such speech sounds which are capable of distinguishing one word from another word of the same language or one grammatical form of a word from another grammatical form of the same word.

The phoneme, its definition, aspects and functions

The aspects of the phoneme:

• material, real and objective
• abstractional and generalised
• functional

The phoneme, its definition, aspects and functions Aspect 1

• The phoneme has a material aspect because it exists in speech in the material form of speech sounds – allophones.
• The phoneme is also a linguistic reality because it exists in real speech.
• The phoneme is objective because it exists independently of the will of individual persons.

The phoneme, its definition, aspects and functions Aspect 2

• The phoneme is abstracted from its variants that exist in actual speech and, at the same time, it is characterized by features common to all its variants (e.g.: /b/ is an occlusive, bilabial, lenis, consonant/. These features are common to all its allophones.

The phoneme, its definition, aspects and functions Aspect 3

• The phoneme has a functional aspect: it is capable of differentiating words and their grammatical forms.