In linguistics (particularly phonetics and phonology), the phonetic environment of a given instance of a speech sound (or "phone"), sometimes also called the phonological environment, consists of the other phones adjacent to and surrounding it. The phonetic environment of a phone can sometimes determine the allophonic or phonemic qualities of a sound in a given language.
For example, the English vowel sound , traditionally called the short A, in a word like mat (phonetically ), has the consonant preceding it and the consonant following it, while the itself is word-internal and forms the syllable nucleus. This all describes the phonetic environment of . In linguistic notation it may be written as /m_t, where the slash can be read as "in the environment", and the underscore represents the target phone's position relative to its neighbours. The expression therefore can be read as "in the environment after the m sound and before the t sound".
See also
- Allophone
- Complementary distribution
- Contrastive distribution
- Free variation
- List of phonetics topics
- Minimal pair
- Phoneme
References
- Hayes, Bruce (2009). Introductory Phonology (1. publ. ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1405184113.
External links
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