Minimal pair

In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ
in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have
distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones constitute two separate
phonemes in the language.

As an example for English vowels, the pair "let" + "lit" can be used to demonstrate that the
phones [ɛ] (in let) and [ɪ] (in lit) do in fact represent distinct phonemes /ɛ/ and /ɪ/. An example for
English consonants is the minimal pair of "pat" + "bat". In phonetics, this pair, like any other,
differs in a number of ways. In this case, the contrast appears largely to be conveyed with a
difference in the voice onset time of the initial consonant as the configuration of the mouth is the
same for [p] and [b]; however, there is also a possible difference in duration, which visual
analysis using high quality video supports.[citation needed]

Phonemic differentiation may vary between different dialects of a language, so that a particular
minimal pair in one accent is a pair of homophones in another. This does not necessarily mean
that one of the phonemes is absent in the homonym accent; merely that it is not present in the
same range of contexts.

Phone is…..

Within phonetics, a phone is:

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

A phonetic transcription is enclosed within square brackets, rather than the slashes of a phonemic
transcription.

Phoneme is…

A phoneme is a basic element of a given 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".[1]

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
being 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 (as described in the "Overview" section below), but they are perceived as the
same sound by speakers of the language, and are therefore both considered to represent a single
phoneme, /k/.

Tone is…

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to
distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other
paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is
called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections,
analogously to consonants and vowels. Such tonal phonemes are sometimes called tonemes.
Tonal languages are extremely common in Africa and East Asia, but rare elsewhere in Asia and
in Europe.

Chroneme is…

In linguistics, a chroneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by
duration only of a vowel or consonant. The noun chroneme is derived from Greek χρονος
(chronos, time), and the suffixed -eme, which is analogous to the -eme in phoneme. However,
this term does not have wide currency, and may even be unknown to phonologists who work on
languages claimed to have chronemes.

Most languages have differences in length of vowels or consonants, but in the case of most
languages it would not be treated phonemically or phonologically as distinctive or contrastive.
Even in those languages which do have phonologically contrastive length, a chroneme is only
posited in particular languages. Use of a chroneme views /aː/ as being composed of two
segments: /a/ and /ː/, whereas in a particular analysis, /aː/ may be a considered a single segment
with length one of its features. This may be compared to the analysis of a diphthong like [ai] as a
single segment /ai/ or as the sequence of a consonant and vowel: /aj/.

For the purposes of analysis of a chronemic contrast, two words with different meaning that are
spoken exactly the same except for length of one segment are considered a minimal pair.

Phonotactics
Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek phōnḗ "voice, sound" and taktikós "having to do with
arranging")[1] is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the
permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure,
consonant clusters, and vowel sequences by means of phonotactical constraints.

Phonotactic constraints are language specific. For example, in Japanese, consonant clusters like
/st/ do not occur. Similarly, the sounds /kn/ and /ɡn/ are not permitted at the beginning of a word
in Modern English but are in German and Dutch, and were permitted in Old and Middle English.

Syllables have the following internal segmental structure:

  Onset (optional)
 Rime (obligatory, comprises Nucleus and Coda):
o Nucleus (obligatory)
o Coda (optional)

English phonotactics
Main article: English phonology

The English syllable (and word) twelfths /twɛlfθs/ is divided into the onset /tw/, the nucleus /ɛ/,
and the coda /lfθs/, and it can thus be described as CCVCCCC (C = consonant, V = vowel). On
this basis it is possible to form rules for which representations of phoneme classes may fill the
cluster. For instance, English allows at most three consonants in an onset, but among native
words under standard accents (and excluding a few obscure learned words such as sphragistics),
phonemes in a three-consonantal onset are limited to the following scheme:[2]

/s/ + pulmonic + approximant:

 /s/ + /m/ + /j/

 /s/ + /t/ + /ɹ/
 /s/ + /t/ + /j/ (not in most accents of American English)
 /s/ + /p/ + /j ɹ l/
 /s/ + /k/ + /j ɹ l w/

This constraint can be observed in the pronunciation of the word blue: originally, the vowel of
blue was identical to the vowel of cue, approximately [iw]. In most dialects of English, [iw]
shifted to [juː]. Theoretically, this would produce **[bljuː]. The cluster [blj], however, infringes
the constraint for three-consonantal onsets in English. Therefore, the pronunciation has been
reduced to [bluː] by elision of the [j].

Other languages don't share the same constraint: compare Spanish pliegue [ˈpljeɣe] or French
pluie [plɥi].

[edit] Sonority hierarchy

In general, the rules of phonotactics operate around the sonority hierarchy, stipulating that the
nucleus has maximal sonority and that sonority decreases as you move away from the nucleus.
The voiceless alveolar fricative [s] is lower on the sonority hierarchy than the alveolar lateral
approximant [l], so the combination /sl/ is permitted in onsets and /ls/ is permitted in codas, but
/ls/ is not allowed in onsets and /sl/ is not allowed in codas. Hence slips /slɪps/ and pulse /pʌls/
are possible English words while *lsips and *pusl are not.

This said, in some cases /s/ is "invisible" to the sonority hierarchy; as a fricative, it is more
sonorant than the plosive /t/. However, combinations like [stiːɫ] (steal), which violates the
sonority hierarchy, are seen and are even common in English. This same property is seen in
many other languages for either /s/ or /z/ and is thus a human universal.[citation needed]