The phonemic inventory of the English language.

The phonemic inventory is a mental list of all the sounds that are permitted in a language and those which are not. Since no one language uses every phoneme that exists in all the languages of the world, each has its own unique list of consonants and vowels its speaker can use. Although many languages use identical phonemes, no two languages share an identical phonemic inventory.

The two main problems:

1.the establishment of the phonemic inventory for a language

Methods:

Distributional – is based on the phonological rule, that different phonemes can occur in one and the same position, while allophones of one and the same phoneme occur in different positions (cat-rat/ cat-skate). It’s possible to establish the phonemic status of any sound just by contrasting it with the other sound without knowing the meaning of the words.

Semantic – attaches great importance to meaning. It’s based on the assumption that a phoneme can distinguish words only when opposed to another phoneme or zero in an identical phonetic context (ask”0”-asks). Pairs of words differing only in one sound are called minimal pairs.

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