I assume you know what an allophone is. But what this blog post supposes […beat…] is that you could be more careful about how you talk about them.

Let us suppose the following:

• the phonemic inventory P of some grammar G contains t and d
• P does not contain s or z
• yet instances of s or z are found on the surface

Thus we might say that /t, d/ are phonemes and [s, z] are allophones (perhaps of /t, d/: maybe in G, derived coronal stop clusters undergo assibilation).

Let us suppose that you’re writing the introduction to a phonological analysis of G, and in Table 1—it’s usually Table 1—you list the phonemes you posit, sorted by place and manner. Perhaps you will place s and z in italics or brackets, and the caption will indicate that this refers to segments which are allophones.

I find this imprecise. It suggests that all instances of surface t or d are phonemic (or perhaps more precisely, and more vacuously, are faithful allophones),¹ which need not be the case. Perhaps G has a rule of perseveratory obstruent cluster voice assimilation and one can derive surface [pt] from /…p-d…/, or surface [gd] from /…g-t…/, and so on. The confusion here seems to be that we are implicitly treating the sets of allophones and phonemes are disjoint when the former is a superset of the latter. What we seem to actually mean when we say that [s, z] are allophones is rather that they are pure allophones: allophones which are not also phonemes.

Another possible way to clarify the hypothetical table 1 is to simply state what phonemes s and z are allophones of, exactly. For instance, if they are purely derived by assibilation, we might write that “the stridents s, z are (pure) allophones of the associated coronal stops /t, d/ respectively”. However, since this might be besides the point, and because there’s no principled upper bound on how many phonemic sources a given (pure or otherwise) allophone might have, I think it should suffice to suggest that s and z are pure allophones and leave it at that.²

This imprecision, I suspect, is a hang-over from structuralist phonemics, which viewed allophony as separate (and arguably, more privileged or entrenched) than alternations (then called morphophonemics). Of course, this assumption does not appear to have any compelling justification, and as Halle (1959) shows, it leads to substantial duplication (in the sense of Kisseberth 1970) between rules of allophony and rules of neutralization.³ Most linguists since Halle seem to have found the structuralist stipulation and the duplication it gives rise to aesthetically displeasing; I concur.

Endnotes

1. I leave open the question of whether surface representations ever contain phonemes: perhaps vacuous rules “faithfully” convert them to allophones.
2. One could (and perhaps should) go further into feature logic, and as such, regard both phonemes and pure allophones as mere bundles of features linked to a single timing slot. However, this makes things harder to talk about.
3. I do not assume that “neutralization” is a grammatical primitive. It is easily defined (see Bale & Reiss 2017, ch. 20) but I see no reason to suppose that grammars distinguish neutralizing processes from other processes.

References

Bale, A. and Reiss, C. 2018. Phonology: A Formal Introduction. MIT Press.
Halle, M. 1959. Sound Pattern of Russian. Mouton.
Kisseberth, C. W. 1970. On the functional unity of phonological rules. Linguistic Inquiry 1(3): 291-306.