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Free Allophones
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
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A free allophone is that allophone of any phoneme for which no feature or articulatory movement is determined by its environment. By extension, an allophone may be said to be free with respect to any undetermined feature or phase even though some other of its features or phases may be determined.
It is partly a matter of terminology. It seems advantageous under certain circumstances, including the pedagogical, to use 'free' as the antonym of 'determined'. If one wants to press the concept of determination to such minute detail as to include all allophones, i.e. to say that no two realizations of a phoneme can be same except in identical environments, then 'determined' has no antonym. But there is ample precedent for drawing a line, perhaps best defined as that between perceptible and nonperceptible. The difference between the /w/s in a queen and chickweed is readily perceptible; the difference between the /k/s, if not so clearly hearable, is certainly perceptible in the proprioceptive sense of the observer's empathic analysis. The difference between the /w/s in a queen and between or in chickweed and shirtwaist is not, however, perceptible, nor, as a matter of labialization, that between the /k/s in a queen and a quart or in chickweed and backwards.
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- Copyright © 1957 by the Linguistic Society of America
References
1 The term ‘feature’ is here used with organogenetic reference, the specifying terminology such as might be put in a chart of articulations. The term ‘phase’ refers to articulatory position or movement between change points as defined by Bloch, A set of postulates for phonemic analysis, Lg. 24.12 (1948).
2 ‘Perceptible’ in the sense noted in Bloch's Postulates 10-1, without the aid of instruments.
3 Cf. W. F. Twaddell, Phonemes and allophones in speech analysis, JASA 24.609 (1952).
4 The analysis may be made in terms of ‘redrawing boundaries’, as suggested by Hockett, Manual of phonology §3222 (Baltimore, 1955), with place of articulation as the extracted feature.
5 According to Navarro Tomás the velar nasal occurs in the speech of individuals and in some dialects, not as a matter of free variation: Manual de pronunciación española4 112 (New York, 1944).
6 Alarcos Llorach uses the latter symbolization in his Fonología española 2 (Madrid, 1954), specifying the allophone for /-#/ (160) and for /-C/ (162-3). His /N/ is the archiphoneme representing the neutralization of place oppositions for nasals.
7 Navarro Tomás states it in both ways, Pronunciación española 4 108.
8 See my Phoneme, allophone—segment, Quart, jour, speech 40.268 and fn. 26 (1954).
9 The onset for stops has not been given as much consideration as the release in specifying allophones, perhaps because not so conspicuous in auditory perception. But note in Bloch and Trager's Outline of linguistic analysis 34 (Linguistic Society, 1942): ‘As we distinguish various kinds of release in stop consonants, so we distinguish also various kinds of onset, or ways of beginning the occlusion.‘
10 Outline 42-4.
11 Robert A. Hall Jr., Descriptive Italian grammar 8 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1948).
12 Zellig S. Harris, Methods in structural linguistics 100 (Chicago, 1951).
13 Cf. Bloch and Trager's ‘fortis apical stop’, Outline 43.
14 If investigation should show no actual or empathically perceived alveolar contact for this perceptible-as-time [t], e.g. in scalloped peppers or baked capon, the specification dental would have to be modified. The zero release and onset are noted by Bloch and Trager, Outline 34.
15 Cherry, Halle, and Jakobson, Toward the logical description of languages in their phonemic aspect, Lg. 29.34-46 (1953); Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, Preliminaries to speech analysis2 (MIT, 1952); Jakobson and Halle, Fundamentals of language (The Hague, 1956).
16 Preliminaries 36.
17 Manual of phonology §2433. Hockett repeats this 2×3 pattern for the nonnasal vowels of Taos, with a slight shift in the symbolization five pages later, §2442, and has in the next paragraph, for Oneida, exactly the 2+3 + 1 pattern suggested here.
18 Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, Preliminaries 43, for English; Alarcos Llorach, Fonología española 2 152, for Spanish. The fact that one specifies tense and the other voiceless has no bearing on the argument here.
19 Pronunciación española 4 98.
20 Fundamentals 11.
21 Manual of phonology 149, §31.
22 Fundamentals 8.
23 By Jakobson in a forum lecture before the Linguistic Institute at the University of Michigan, Summer 1956.
24 Carol D. Schatz, The role of context in the perception of stops, Lg. 30.47-56 (1954).
25 Manual of phonology §2521341.
26 Cf. Twaddell, JASA 24.609: ‘Speakers of a language seem to respond to phonemic differences and ignore allophonic differences.‘