| Speech | Writing |
|---|---|
| Phone: elementary unit of sound in a language. Conventionally enclosed in slashes: /q/. | Graph: "the general term for any unit of any script" (Sampson 22). Conventionally enclosed in angle brackets: <ü>. |
| Phoneme: significantly different phones or families of allophones in a particular language. Thus, /s/ and /p/ are separate phonemes because we can use them to distinguish the words /soot/ and /poot/. | Grapheme
: analogous to phoneme. An allograph
would be a member of a family of graphs constituting a single grapheme. Thus, <g> and <g> are allographs, but <g> and <G> are not. According to DeFrancis, a grapheme is "the meaningless graphic unit that corresponds to the smallest segment of speech represented in the writing. This is the basic operational unit without which a script simply could not function" (54). |
| Syllable
: "A unit of speech consisting of a single pulse of breath and forming a word or part
of a word" (Random House Unabridged Dictionary
). English has 8,000, Yi 800, Japanese ~100, and Chinese 1,277 counting tones and
398 not counting them. | |
| Word:
"Not only laymen's conceptions of what a word is depend to a considerable degree
on language as it is written; as Linell (1982: 83) points out, 'it is hardly a mere
coincidence that the notion of the morphological word corresponds well with the unit of conventional writing, a sequence of letters surrounded by empty spaces but containing no internal spaces.' Bierwisch (1972) tries to deal with the problem of a consistent definition of word
by suggesting that there are several non-congruent notions: that is, the orthographic word, the phonetic word and the semantic word" (Coulmas 40). | Frame
: "The basic unit of writing that is surrounded by white space on the printed page frames are most clearly evidenced in the entries found in dictionaries. This being so, perhpas frames might better be defined as the items occuring in lexical lists such as dictionaries, and hence might better be renamed lexemes
" (DeFrancis 54-55). |
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