Definition(s) of phoneme

Question

What different definitions of phoneme do you know?

Please note that I'm not asking for an explanation of what phoneme is but rather for professional definitions. I'm interested in how the issue is tackled in different phonological theories.

Edit: It sure is very interesting (no irony) to see how different authors explain why they're not going to refer to phoneme in their work. However, if you come across a definition (of the kind of definitions of terms that they have in mathematics), I will be still grateful if you cared to add it or refer to it here.

Answer 1

see Kortlandt (1972) for discussion on the development of the phoneme in Soviet phonological theory, also Freeman (1935) for an idea of the issues at hand in the early days of American Structuralism.

American linguists today tend to be either uncritical about a definition or openly hostile to the concept:

Gussenhoven & Jacobs (1998: 55) "The term phoneme is used to refer to the segment category that the various allophones are variants of."

Odden (2005: 43) "In english, [t] and [th] are predictable variants of a single abstract segment, a phoneme, which we represent as /t/. Predictable variants are termed allophones -- the sounds are in complementary distribution because the context where one variant appears is the complement of the context where the other sound appears."

Ladefoged "Vowels and Consonants" (2001: 193--4) "If we are thinking in acoustic terms, even ? is not so far from t. On a spectrogram both correspond to very similar gaps in the pattern. Linguists have a term for a group of similar sounds of this kind. They call it a phoneme...We talk of the difference between kit and pit being the use of the phoneme /k/ as opposed to the phoneme /p/. There is usually no harm in expressing htings this way. But it is important to remember that it is a kind of shorthand. A phoneme is not a single sound but a group of sounds.

Silverman (2006: 215) "For our purposes though, the phoneme is not an entity on any level—functional, phonetic, psychological, or even metaphorical. Rather, at best, phoneme is merely a terminological expedient that might capture the functional non-distinctness of any collection of phonetic properties that allomorphically alternates. And yet, despite its expedience, I choose to avoid the term altogether, because terminological expedients have a demonstrated tendency to become reified by their users."

Ladefoged (ms.) "Perhaps the most startling conspiracy — one that seems to have deceived by far the majority of linguists — is the appearance of phonemes. Accounts of human behavior in terms of phonemes are nearly always examples of what has been called the psychologist's fallacy — the notion that because an act can be described in a given way that it is necessarily structured in that way. As will be shown later, phoneme size units play only a minor role in human behavioral acts such as normal speaking and listening. They are, nevertheless, great imaginary objects for use in describing linguistic aspects of speech."

Goldsmith (1976: 17--8) "The standard linguistic assumption regarding the nature of phonological representations...implies that the process of language acquisition and of perception includes the development of the ability to take a representation and slice it vertically into columns...Let us call this assumption the "Absolute Slicing Hypothesis" ... The assumption of the Absolute Slicing Hypothesis fails...and this failure is in no sense a trivial one."

==== I'm going to add the index entry for for "Phoneme" in Fischer-Jorgensen (1975) "Trends in phonological theory", since I didn't have that book with me yesterday:

Phoneme
(1) concept and definition of the phoneme as:
an abstractional fictitious unit 6.12
a bundle of distinctive properties (features) 3.3, 6.4, 8.3, 8.4, 8.18, 11.7, 11.25
a class of (non-contrastive) sounds 6.13, 12.10
a family of sounds 4.3
an element of a morpheme 11.3, 11.9
an ideal abstract sound type 12.17
a member of a phonological opposition 3.3, 4.3
a minimum distinctive unit 11.3, 11.7, 11.10, 11.30
a minimum same of vocal feature 6.4
a minimum unit, differentiating signifiers 11.15, 11.18
a notion with differentiating function 11.4
a point in a pattern 2.12
a physical unit 6.11
a psychologically defined unit 2.4, 3.3, 11.3
a purely logical symbol 6.14, 6.15
the realization of a morphon 10.4, 10.6, 10.12, 10.14
a unit based on comparison 11.30
a useless concept 9.67, 9.68 (but cp. 9.70)
...

Answer 2

I thought the following two passages nicely summarize current thinking on the phoneme in phonology:

"The most conspicuously unresolved issue in phonology, in my view, is the debate over the classical phoneme that began in the late 1950s. The critiques by Halle (1959) and Chomsky (1964) deprived the traditional phoneme concept of its theoretical legitimacy, but it has nevertheless survived more or less intact in practical applications (such as speech therapy, reading and literacy training, and speech technology), in linguistic fieldwork, and -revealingly - in beginning linguistics courses. Schane's contention (1971) that generative phonology had only superficially done away with the phoneme has never been refuted (see further Ladd 2006)."

Ladd, D. R. 2011. Phonetics in phonology. In John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, and Alan C. L. Yu. 2011. Handbook of phonological theory. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

The final draft is available here

Dresher, Elan. 2011. Phoneme. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume & Keren Rice, eds., The Blackwell companion to phonology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. (a monumental work on phonology, in 5 volumes, a must-read!)

"The concept of the phoneme was central to the development of phonological theory. In the early twentieth century, phonological theory was all about the phoneme: how to define it, how to recognize it, how to discover it (see, for example, the articles selected for inclusion in Joos 1957 and Makkai 1972). The American structuralist term for phonology, phonemics, indicates to what extent the field was considered to be about the phoneme.

Things have now changed. The phoneme, to all appearances, no longer holds a central place in phonological theory. Two recent and voluminous handbooks devoted to phonology, edited by Goldsmith (1995) and by de Lacy (2007), have no chapter on the phoneme. It is barely mentioned in the indexes. This does not mean that the phoneme plays no role in modern phonology; closer inspection reveals that the phoneme is far from dead [emphasis mine - Alex B.]. However, it is not much talked about, and when it is, it is more often to dispute its existence than to affirm it.

[...]

As the above survey shows, the phoneme has not disappeared from phonological theory. The fact that recent handbooks of phonology have no chapters devoted to it is not a sign of its demise; rather, it is a function of the development of phonological theory [emphasis mine - Alex B.]. The time is past when one can attempt to provide an exhaustive definition of the phoneme and its properties apart from elaborating a complete theory of phonology. Many current topics in phonology can be viewed as being about aspects of the phoneme, even though the phoneme is not invoked."

On the phoneme in psycholinguistics: Uppstad and Tønnessen 2010

Answer 3

Just to put in my two cents here, I've always thought of phonemes as equivalence classes over the set of linguistically attested acoustic signals. With a given statistical model in place, membershiphood into a phonemic class is determined on statistical similarity. I would guess that the model is determined by a vector of real parameters, meaning that the signal space is a euclidean space and phonemic categories are a matter of euclidean clustering. Then statistical similarity becomes a question of euclidean distance, or some other metric on the signal space. Though I haven't yet read into the matter yet, this is the definition I am expecting going into acoustic phonetics. At least with this definition, idiolectual variation is accommodated and experimental error is easily overcome. I'm just speculating at this point, but I would guess that allophones are witnessed by further analysis of a given phonemic category, perhaps by dense euclidean subclusters.

I really have no idea since I haven't read into the subject, but I don't like this definition because it appears at least to be model dependent; even if the signal space is assumed euclidean, a different probabilistic model may yield different clusters. At this point I should stop speculating, but I can't help think that, as convenient as this theory would be, it doesn't yet address the internal representation of what these clusters might represent. This approach does seem very intuitive though.

There's a paper I just found A cross-linguistic investigation of locus equations as a phonetic descriptor for place of articulation. Sussman 1993 that apparently makes a "100% classification rate for 3 places of articulation" and the method involves using a regression relationship of F2 onset and F2 mid of a vowel V when it occurs after a stop C. So, CV for C=[b,d,ɡ]

Strong linear regression relationships were found for every stop category across all speakers. Slopes and y intercepts systematically varied as a function of place of articulation.

I'm not sure what the significance of this is, but it seems relevant.