THE COMBINATORY POSITIONAL CHANGES OF PHONEMES
Keywords:
phonemic variation in connected speech, context-dependent allophonic realizations, combinatory phonetic changes, positional phonetic changes, regressive, progressive, and reciprocal assimilation, coarticulatory influence between adjacent sounds, vowel–consonant accommodation processes, coalescence and sound merging phenomena, vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, quantitative and qualitative vowel reduction, neutralization of phonological oppositions, position-based allophones of consonants and vowels, articulatory and acoustic phonetics, phonotactic and prosodic conditioning of sound change, syllable structure and stress-dependent variation, speech economy and articulatory simplification, connected-speech phonological processes, phonological system adaptability and variation, surface vs. underlying phonemic representations.Abstract
The study explores the complex system of combinatory and positional changes of phonemes, which represent two fundamental categories of phonetic variation in natural languages. While phonemes are traditionally viewed as stable, contrastive units of a language’s sound system, their actual realizations in spoken communication are dynamic and context-dependent. Combinatory changes arise through the direct interaction of adjacent sounds and reflect the pervasive influence of coarticulation. These include assimilation, where one phoneme becomes similar to a neighboring phoneme in terms of voicing, place, manner, or other articulatory features; accommodation, which involves mutual influence between consonants and vowels; and coalescence, in which two sounds merge to form a single new segment. Such processes reveal the mechanisms through which speakers optimize articulatory transitions, reduce effort, and maintain fluency in connected speech.
Positional changes, on the other hand, are governed by the phoneme’s structural location within a word or syllable rather than by immediate phonetic environment.
Taken together, combinatory and positional changes provide insight into how phonological systems balance stability with flexibility. Their study is essential for understanding the relationship between abstract phonemic representations and their surface realizations, for analyzing sound patterns synchronically and diachronically, and for improving linguistic models of speech perception and production.
