The study of linguistics

Question

What phoneme is seen as a sound unit :

a) a physical phoneme

b) an abstract phoneme

c) a structural phoneme

Answer 1

In English, physical sounds are seen as phonemes. There are cases when we add "aspiration" to some phoneme. For instance, the phoneme [t] in the word "still" is different from the aspirated phoneme in the word "table". We have then the aspirated [tʰ]. In this case, the aspirated sound is called allophone of the same phoneme [t].