Chapter 6: Phonology

Phonology

study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages.

Phones

phonetic sounds that occur in the language and the ways in which they pattern.

Phonology

study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages.

Phones

phonetic sounds that occur in the language and the ways in which they pattern.

Phonemes

the abstract basic units that differentiate words.

Complementary distribution

two or more phonetically similar segments never occur in the same phonetic environment (they are allophones of the same phoneme)

Allophones

predictable phonetic variants

Phonetic features

units of sound that distinguish one sound from another, describing how it is produced or received (e.g., voiced, high, front, back, etc)

Distinctive features

“voiced” “continuant” etc.

Nondistinctive

features like aspiration are nondistinctive, but are still apart of phonetic context.

Minimal pair

two words are distinguished by a sinle phone occuring in the same position.

Prosodic/segmental features

such as pitch, stress, and segement length.

Tone languages

syllables or words are contrasted by pitch

Assimilation rules

two sounds become more similar to one another because they are spoken consectively.

Dissimilation rules

two similar sounds become less alike

Epenthetic rules

adding a sound (usually a vowel) within a word, to break up a difficult consonant cluster or to satisy a language’s phonotactic constraints.

Natural classes

phonemes within a language that share certain phoentic features and behave similarly phonological processes.

(e.g., /p/, /t/, /k/ are voicless stops —share features of being voiceless)

Morphophonemic rules

specifiying the pronounciations of morphemes in different environments.

Phonotactic

determine which sounds may be adjacent within the syllable.

Accidental gaps/Nonsense words

possible but nonoccuring words.