The inventory of a corpus is always based on the canonical pronunciations, not the full set of sounds in ANY pronunciation variants. So e.g. if your English canonical pronunciations contain /t/ and /d/, but your variants contain [ɾ], you can't search for [ɾ] or include it in your analyses. We need to allow inventories to be built from:
- the canonical forms only ('phonological' inventory)
- the variants only ('phonetic' inventory)
- a merged inventory of both ('total' inventory)