Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Whitehead  A phoneme is a sequence of sounds in speech; according to one theory we speak in phonemes - sequences of words - rather than word by word. |
I'm not familiar with that extention of the theory; that
pushed open can be "one unit, one phomene." Before we continue, you may want to take a look
here, and
here, and
here, so that we are on the same page, sort to speak.
To me a phoneme is an abstract unit, and it's smaller than a word. The determiner "a", the past tense markers /d/, /t/, and the plural markers /s/ /z/) are all phonemes, and they're also morpho-phonemes because they represent a minimal meaningful unit, a morpheme. The phrase
pushed open, for example, has 3 morphemes,7 phonemes, and 7 or 8 phones, or sounds, depending on how deep you want to go. (Please note, I can't get IPA to work on this page so /e/, [e] and /u/, [u] are not the correct vowels, and /sh/, [sh] are not the correct consonants.)
Morphemes: push, -ed, open
Phonemes: /p/, /u/, /sh/, /t/ and /o/, /e/, /n/
Phones: [p], [u], [sh], [t] and [o], [p], [e], [n]
In short, to me
pushed open can't be "one unit, one phomene". But I am willing to learn.
