Phonology cont.
- Phonemes: smallest unit of sound that can be used to distinguish words
- abstract mental category
- made up of allophones (phonetic variants) which speakers of a language consider to be the same sound
- all phonemes must have at least one allophone
- each phoneme has a number of possible pronunciations based on the phonetic context
- speaker hears allophones and they are grouped in the mind as phonemes
- phonemes /k/ allophones [k]
- Phonological Analysis: Contrast
- contrastive distribution: when two sounds occur in identical environments and change the meaning of words
- minimal pair: pair of words that differ by only one segment and mean dif things
- sue and zoo, raced and raised, hiss and his
- sub-minimal pairs: two sounds seem to contrast but you can’t find any minimal pairs to prove it
- redo and distress, heard and bert
- true minimal pairs are always better evidence
- non-contrast: phonological analysis can determine when one phoneme has multiple pronunciations (allophones) but no minimal pairs
- phonetically similar - differ from one another in only one or two low-level phonetic properties
- ex: aspiration, velarization, nasalization
- sounds are fundamentally the same but have different states
- complementary distribution - must occur in complementary, non-overlapping environments
- mutually-exclusive where they show up in words
- light l always happens at beginning
- dark l always happens at end of word
- phonetically natural - the different environments of sounds follow some sort of regular or phonetically explainable patterns
- sounds are similar
- there’s a natural reason to expect one basic sound to be pronounced as something else
- trying to hit the target, sometimes you may be off but they’re all acceptable enough
- free variation - two+ segments are phonetically similar and can be substituted for each other in a word without changing the meaning of the word
- different dialects
- infinite variant pronunciations of a phoneme occur in continuous speech in every language