Problems in phonemic analysis

The concept of the phoneme was introduced, and a few theoretical problems connected with phonemic analysis have been mentioned. The general assumption (as in most phonetics books) has been that speech is composed of phonemes and that usually whenever a speech sound is produced by a speaker it is possible to identify which phoneme that sound belongs to. While this is often true, we must recognize that there are exceptions which make us consider some quite serious theoretical problems. From the comparatively simple point of view of learning pronunciation, these problems are not particularly important. However, from the point of view of learning about the phonology of English they are too important to ignore.

There are problems of different types. In some cases, we have difficulty in deciding on the overall phonemic system of the accent we are studying, while in others we are concerned about how a particular sound fits into this system.