ABSTRACT
Phonemics is the study of phonemes in their various aspects, i.e. their establishment, description, occurrence, arrangement, etc. Phonemes fall under two categories, segmental or linear phonemes and suprasegmental or non-linear phonemes; they will be explained below. The term ‘phonemics’, with the above-mentioned sense attached to it, was widely used in the heyday of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics in America, in particular from the 1930s to the 1950s, and continues to be used by present-day postBloomfieldians. Note in this connection that Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) himself used the term ‘phonology’, not ‘phonemics’, and talked about primary phonemes and secondary phonemes whilst using the adjectival form ‘phonemic’ elsewhere. The term ‘phonology’, not ‘phonemics’, is generally used by contemporary linguists of other schools.
