Frequent comment has been made in passing in the chapters above on matters of transcription, and a variety of types of transcription have been used for different purposes. These different types of transcription can be classified on a principled basis. It would clearly be possible to classify different ways of notating units at all linguistic levels of analysis from phonetics and phonology to semantics and pragmatics, and to classify phonetic notation covering both segmental and suprasegmental effects. This chapter will address the question of the classification of transcription only at the levels of phonetics and phonology, and within those levels will consider issues of transcription related only to the segment. Furthermore, consideration will be confined to phonemic models of phonology. The classificatory criteria employed will be partly linguistic, reflecting a view of the relationship between phonetics and phonology, and partly typographical, reflecting a view of the relationship between the spoken medium and the written medium of language.

Phonological and phonetic transcriptions

The first classificatory division of types of transcription depends on whether the motivation for constructing the transcription is primarily phonological or directly phonetic. Phonologically motivated transcriptions include phonemic and allophonic transcription. In the case of both phonemic and allophonic transcriptions, the intention is to bring into the foreground of analytic attention comments on phonological abstractions about the utterances concerned. In the case of a phonemic transcription, the object of attention is the system of phonemic contrasts exploited by the accent of the language concerned, and the ways in which these are distributed over phonological and higher-level units of the language.