PHONOLOGY

Definition
 Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Grundzüge der Phonologie (1939) defines phonology as "the study of sound pertaining to the system of language,"
 According to Clark et al. (2007), it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use.

In the language acquisition process is when the infant combines some sounds to produce syllables of parts of syllables which have some meaningful intent. This stage of language acquisition can be technically paralleled to the field of Phonology which is the study of speech sounds - called Phonems - in their combinations which are specific to a language.

And the basic unit of sound is a phoneme.
The fundamental unit of grammar is a morpheme.
 A basic unit of written language is a grapheme.

Branches of phonology
 There are 4 branches :

1. Segmental Phonology : It analyses speech into discrete segements , such as Phonemes.
2. Supra Segmental Phonology : It analyses those features which extend over more than one segment such as stress, intonation, tempo and rhythm.

Branchese of Phonology

PHONEME & ALLOPHONES
 

PHONEME

Phoneme is one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language and it make a difference to meaning.. The term is usually restricted to vowels and consonants.  

For example in English : /m/ of mat and the /b/ of  bat.

 

ALLOPHONE

An Allophone is one of several similar speech sounds (phones) that belong to the same phoneme.

For example in English :

 [p^h] as in pin and [p] as in spin are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language because they cannot distinguish words. They are different, the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated (plain).

 

 

The relationship between a phoneme and allophones :

1. A phoneme is manifested as one or more phones (phonetic sounds) in different environments. These phones are called allophones.

2. A phoneme is a set of allophones or individual non-contrastive speech segments. Allophones are sounds, whilst a phoneme is a set of such sounds.

The differentiate between a phoneme and allophones :

The phoneme placed in slant brackets (/ /) and the allophones placed in square brackets ([ ]).

REFERENCES :
 http://www.slideshare.net/thepratik91/phonology-introduction
https://www.teachit.co.uk/armoore/lang/phonology.htm#top
 http://retyaelsivia.blogspot.co.id/2011/06/phoneme-allophone-morpheme-allomorph.html