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Phones and phonemes

A phone can be defined as any speech sound or gestures regardless of the critical

meaning of the sound. In other words, phones are a phoneme on the other hand is a speech

sound that contains meaning in a language in that it can change a word to another if swapped

with another phoneme. Phonemes are therefore sound differences that are used to distinguish

different words. Each language uses a set of phones to make phonemes. Phonetics is the study of

organization of sound in a language. On the other hand, phonemic transcriptions show how

individuals interpret different sounds. Square brackets are used to enclose phones for instance [s]

while slashes are used to enclose a phoneme for instance /s/.

A morpheme can be defined as a morphological element in language that cannot be

divided into further parts. For example in the word the word ‘sawn’ can be divided into

morphemes /saw/ + /n/. There are different types of morphemes. In the word ‘sawn’ the

morpheme /saw/ can exist on its own and does not need to be attached to another morpheme to

bring out meaning. It is therefore known as a free morpheme [ CITATION Ben06 \p 31 \l 1033 ] .

However, there are other forms of morphemes that need to be affixed to other units and only

occur as parts of given words. Such morphemes are known as bound morphemes. All bound
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morphemes are affixes, either prefix or suffix. Prefixes are those attached before a unit while

suffixes are added after a unit. Derivational morphemes help in creating new words from bases.

For example, a new word can be formed from the word act by either adding a suffix or a prefix.

For instance, we can add the prefix /re/ to act to form the word react.

Re+ act= react

Work Cited

O'Dwyer, Benard. Modern English Structures: Form, Function, and Position. Peterborough,

Ont: Broadview Press, 2006.