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Abstract
It is a well-known fact that the members of a set of traditional phonemes, which by definition serve to distinguish the two members of a minimal pair (such as a ?/ i: in bite/beat), may occasionally be used interchangeably without any semantic consequences (as a ?/ i: in either). Phonemes that can alternate in this way are arguably more closely related to each other than to other phonemes. The present paper is an attempt to chart such relations in British English in a quantitative fashion in order to see how systematic they are and to draw some theoretical and practical conclusions from the results.