Which term describes a phonetic variant of a phoneme that does not change meaning and is conditioned by position in a word?

• A. Allophone
• B. Phone
• C. Idiom
• D. Parataxis

Answer: (A)

In phonology, a single phoneme can have different concrete realizations called allophones, which appear in specific environments but do not change the word’s meaning. These variants arise from how the surrounding sounds or position in a word shape the actual pronunciation, yet speakers recognize them as the same underlying sound. For example, the English /t/ can be aspirated [tʰ] at the start of a stressed syllable and unaspirated [t] after an initial /s/ in a cluster; both sounds belong to the same phoneme and do not create different words. A phone is any individual speech sound without regard to its role in meaning, an idiom is a fixed figurative expression, and parataxis is a syntactic arrangement concept, not a phonological variant. So the described term is allophone.