No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Phoneme or Prosodeme?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
Extract
The term prosodeme has been used in recent writings on phonemcis as a stylistic variant of prosodic phoneme to describe such modifications of the basic speech sounds as tone, stress, and duration. Bloch and Trager, in 1942, also included juncture as a ‘related phenomenon’. In his recent postulates for phonemic analysis, Bloch appears to have been unable to find any common denominator for these features, since he abstracts duration at one point of his analysis, pitch and stress at quite another, and finds no basis at all for including juncture. In general, the distinction that has been made in recent American writings on the subject has been one between so-called segmental and suprasegmental phonemes. Some sounds are thought of as occurring one after another, like bricks in a wall, while others occur simultaneously with these and usually span a number of the individual bricks at a time. There are troublesome aspects of this definition, since there are some simultaneous linguistic phenomena, which, as Bloch says in his article on postulates (§48.2), ‘we do not usually wish to treat in the same way’. It will be the purpose of this paper to consider more closely the nature of the prosodemes, and see if it may not be possible to find a common factor which sets them off from the usual linear phonemes. We shall question the use of the term ‘suprasegmental’ as an adequate description of the prosodemes, and ask whether we are justified in classifying the prosodemes as a special kind of phoneme.
Information
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1949 Linguistic Society of America
References
1 Cf. George L. Trager, The theory of accentual systems, Language culture and personality 131–45 (Menasha, Wis., 1941); George L. Trager and Bernard Bloch, The syllabic phonemes of English, Lg. 17.223–46 (1941); Bloch and Trager, Outline of linguistic analysis (Baltimore, 1942), esp. 34–6, 47–8; Bernard Bloch, A set of postulates for phonemic analysis, Lg. 24.3–46 (1948).
2 Outline of linguistic analysis 34.
3 Cf. Kenneth L. Pike, Phonemics (Ann Arbor, 1947), esp. 23–4, 105–15; Harry Hoijer, Pitch accent in the Apachean languages, Lg. 19.38–40 (1943); Stanley S. Newman, On the stress system of English, Word 2.171–87 (1946). Newman's description of contrastive accent as ‘expressive’ does not seem entirely apt, since there is no apparent difference between the contrastive accent and the ‘nuclear heavy’ stress which normally falls on the last stress in a phrase, except for the difference in location. In both cases we are dealing with a phrasal accent which may be variously placed for various syntactic purposes.
4 Cf. Charles F. Hockett, A system of descriptive phonology, Lg. 18.3–21 (1942), esp. 8, where he includes voicelessness as a suprasegmental feature in crypt and the like, but distinguishes this kind from the prosodic features since it is ‘not always suprasegmental’. When he says ‘loud stress never accompanies a single segmental phase in English’, he appears to have overlooked such monosyllabic and monophonemic utterances as ah!, aw! [or such utterances as out, where the loud stress accompanies only the first part of the diphthong and no more].
5 Bloomfield distinguished within the prosodemes between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ phonemes, using the latter for such phenomena as sentence intonation and English stress. He defines secondary phonemes (Language 90 [New York, 1933]) as those which ‘are not part of any simple meaningful speech-form taken by itself, but appear only when two or more are combined into a larger form, or else when speech-forms are used in certain ways—especially as sentences.‘
6 Language 111.
7 Pike, Tone languages 8 (Ann Arbor, 1948).
8 Ibid. 4.
9 Cf. Ernst W. Selmer, Tonelag og tonefald i Bergens bymaal (Kristiania, 1921). The published charts show the ups and downs, but have not been analyzed in terms of the relation to the syllabic stroke.
10 The syllabic phonemes of English, Lg. 17.234.
11 Bulletin de la Société Linguistique 35.52–7 (1934); La phonologie du mot en danois 258 ff. (Paris, 1937).
12 Svend Smith, Contributions to the solution of problems concerning the Danish stød: Summary and curves (Copenhagen, 1944).
13 A similar point of view appears to be expressed by Pike in Phonemics 63: ‘Quantitative characteristics, and these only, may serve as suprasegmental phonemes in the structure of morphemes.‘
- 13
- Cited by