Emic unit

An emic unit is a type of abstract object analyzed in linguistics and related fields. Kinds of emic units are generally denoted by terms with the suffix -eme, such as phoneme, grapheme, and morpheme. An emic unit is defined by Nöth (1995) as "an invariant form obtained from the reduction of a class of variant forms to a limited number of abstract units". The variant forms are called etic units (from phonetic). This means that a given emic unit is considered to be a single underlying object that may have a number of different observable "surface" representations.

The various etic units that represent a given emic unit of a certain kind are denoted by a corresponding term with the prefix allo-, such as allophone, allograph, allomorph (corresponding respectively to phoneme, grapheme, morpheme). The relation between an emic unit and the corresponding etic forms is sometimes called the allo/eme relationship.

The first "emic unit" to be considered, in the late 19th century, was the phoneme. This term was originally used (in its French form phonème) to refer simply to a speech sound, but it soon came to be used to denote an abstract concept as it does today (for more details, see Phoneme: Background and related ideas). The word comes from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, meaning "that which is sounded", from the verb φωνέω, phōneō, "sound", which comes in turn from the noun φωνή, phōnē, "sound". Other emic units, such as morpheme and grapheme, came to be named using the -eme suffix by analogy with phoneme. The actual terms "emic unit" and "etic unit" were introduced by Kenneth Pike (1954).

The prefix allo- used in terms such as allophone is from the Ancient Greek ἄλλος meaning "other". The prefix is also used in chemistry.

The following are the most commonly analyzed kinds of emic units in linguistics:

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