[Andrew Whitehead]

Originally Posted by Casiopea

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.

'Pushed open' can be treated as a single item (unit appears to have a special meaning for you?) when you teach it - "It is a phrasal verb". As the guy we are responding to is a tutor it may be better for him to take that approach, as English students are rarely linguists and probably have little interest in whether 'open' is a verb or adverb in this situation - and definitely little interest in morphemes, phones, allophones or any other way of breaking 'pushed open' into linguistic units!

It is worth remembering who your audience is, as this is a 'using english' forum and not a 'linguistic analysis' forum...


As for the theory, it revolves around the question of how we construct a sentence when we speak. One idea is that we use remembered collections of words rather than individual words. This also explains catch-phrases, sound-bites, cliches, etc. which are groups of words remembered as one unit, or item if you prefer.

I thought these were labelled as phonemes, meaning 'a sound that isn't a word'. I understand your comment that a phoneme is generally shorter than a word, and I had the same thought, but I can't think of any other word that describes it and phoneme is the one that keeps popping up in my mind. Maybe the term was hijacked, or I may be remembering the term incorrectly as I have only a passing interest in such things. If that is the the case then my apologies for confusing you.