PHONOLOGICAL CONTRAST10/12/2010

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Recap ❖ Phonology: phonological rules and processes

❖ Phonological rule: a segment in the underlying form is pronounced differently in a certain phonological environment

❖ Underlying form: the lexical entry — the stored pronunciation of a word or sound

❖ Environment: where a segment occurs, de"ned by the segments that neighbor it

❖ Some processes that change underlying forms are epenthesis, deletion, metathesis, assimilation, dissimilation, and reduction.

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Vowel reduction

❖ English: unstressed vowels are o#en pronounced as schwa [ə]

★ Canada [kǽnədə]

★ Canadian [kənéjdiən]

❖ Stressed vs. unstressed the: [i] reduces to [ə]

★ the Queen of England (the one and only) [ðij kwijn]

★ the Queen of England [ðə kwijn]

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Rule writing

❖ When we’re confronted with data, we ask three questions:

★ Is there a pattern? Could the environment be playing a role?

★ What are the possible patterns?

★ What is the underlying form?

❖ First step: is there a pattern?

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IS THERE A PATTERN?

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Contrast

❖ Speakers know which segments of their language contrast and which do not

❖ Segments are in contrast when their presence alone can change the meaning of a word

also “distinctive”, “in opposition”

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Contrast

❖ Examples from English:

★ [s] and [z]: sip [sɪp] and zip [zɪp]

★ [ɪ] and [ɑ]: hit [hɪt] and hot [hɑt]

❖ In these words, when we change the sound, we change the meaning

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Contrast❖ When two segments contrast in an environment, there’s no rule

to predict when you get one versus the other

❖ What’s the environment that each sound occurs in?

★ [s] or [z]?

★ sip [sɪp] and zip [zɪp]

★ [ɪ] or [ɑ]?

★ hit [hɪt] and hot [hɑt]

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Minimal pairs❖ First step: establish which sounds are in contrast with each other in the

language

★ Different for every language

❖ Minimal pair: two words with distinct meanings that differ only by exactly one segment found in the same position in each word

★ [sɪp] and [zɪp]

★ [hɪt] and [hɑt]

★ [lus] and [luz]

★ [fəsi] and [fəzi]

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Minimal pairs❖ Minimal pairs based on sound and not spelling

❖ Minimal pair test:

★ Find a minimal pair for two sounds e.g. [p] and [b]

★ If there is a minimal pair, the two sounds are contrastive in that language

❖ Apply the minimal pair test for these pairs of sounds:

★ [p] and [b]

★ [i] and [ɪ]

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Minimal pairs

❖ Near-minimal pair: two words with distinct meanings that contrast segments in nearly identical environments.

★ Some languages don’t have minimal pairs for every pair of sounds, but the sounds may still be contrastive

★ In this case, use near-minimal pairs:

★ assure [əʃʊ́ɹ] vs. azure [ǽʒɹ]̩

★ author [ɔ́θɹ̩] vs. either [íjðɹ ̩]

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Phonemes

❖ Not every segment we produce is stored in our heads

★ Since rules can predict when we get certain segments, we don’t need to store them all

★ For example, aspiration on stops in English is predictable, so we don’t need to store whether a stop is aspirated or not in our lexicon

★ (e rule does all the work

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Phonemes

❖ Phonemes: distinctive sounds in a language that contrast with other sounds in that language

❖ Phonemes are the set of sounds you store in your lexicon

❖ If two sounds are contrastive (i.e. pass the minimal pair test), they belong to separate phonemes of that language

❖ Since we can’t write a rule to describe the distribution of the two contrastive sounds, we say they’re both stored in the lexicon

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Announcements

❖ HW posted Friday

★ (ree phonology problems

❖ Assignment will be returned Monday

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Phonemes

❖ Native speakers perceive phonemes as different and distinct sounds

★ Knowledge of phonology of your language = knowledge of which sounds can change the meaning of a word

❖ Phones (=sounds) come out of your mouth, but phonemes are in your head

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Allophones

❖ Allophones are different pronunciations of a phoneme

❖ Two sounds are allophones of the same phoneme if they have the same underlying form

★ e.g., aspirated and un-aspirated [t] in English are allophones of the same phoneme

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Transcription❖ When we transcribed phones in phonetics we used square brackets

[ ]:

★ [sɪp]

★ Allophones

❖ When we transcribe phonemes, we use / /:

★ /sɪp/

❖ We use the two types of brackets to distinguish between underlying form (phonemes) and actual pronunciation (allophones)

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Other contrastive segments

❖ Some segments don’t have minimal pairs

❖ May never occur in same environment:

★ English [h] and [ŋ]: [h] only occurs at the beginning of words, [ŋ] at the end of syllables

❖ Rare segments: [ʒ] is very rare in English (occurs mostly in words borrowed from French)

★ Leash [liʃ] and leige [liʒ]

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Other contrastive segments

❖ However, these sounds may still be contrastive

❖ (e Minimal Pair Test tells us when two sounds are contrastive, but does not tell us when two sounds are not contrastive

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Language-speci"c contrasts

❖ Whether or not two sounds are contrastive is language-speci"c

★ Two sounds can be phonetically distinct without being phonologically contrastive

❖ If two sounds aren’t contrastive, they are in complementary distribution

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Complementary Distribution

❖ When two sounds are in complementary distribution, they never appear in the same environment

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Language-speci"c contrasts❖ Example: English vs. Turkish [ɛ] and [æ]

English Turkish

[bɛn] ‘Ben’ [bɛn] ‘I’

[bæn] ‘ban’ [bæn] ‘I’

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Language-speci"c contrasts

❖ Long and short vowels don’t contrast in English, but do in Japanese and Finnish

Japanese

[toɽi] ‘bird’ [toɽiː] ‘shrine gate’

[kibo] ‘scale’ [kiboː] ‘hope’

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Language-speci"c contrasts

Finnish

[tuli] ‘!re’ [tuːli] ‘wind’

[hætæ] ‘distress’ [hæːtæː] ‘to evict’

English

[hæt] ‘hat’ [hæːt] ‘hat’

[hit] ‘heat’ [hiːt] ‘heat’

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Non-contrastive sounds?

❖ First step: establish which sounds are contrastive (using Minimal Pair Test)

❖ Next, we will discover how to deal with sounds that are not contrastive in a language

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RULES

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10/13/2010

Levels of representation

❖ Two levels of representation

★ Phonemes = underlying form

★ Allophones = surface form

❖ Phonemes are the contrastive sounds of a language (in our minds)

❖ Allophones are the predictable phonetic variants of the phonemes (what we pronounce)

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Rules❖ A rule has two parts:

★ A statement of the change (using an arrow)

★ A statement about the environment in which the change takes place

❖ General form:

★ Underlying form ➙ Surface form / environment

★ /X/ ➙ [Y] / A_B

★ (e phoneme /X/ is pronounced as the allophone [Y] when it occurs between an A and B

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Example

A B

blue [blu] plow [pl ̥aw]

gleam [glim] clap [kl ̥æp]

slip [slɪp] clear [kl ̥iɹ]

"og [flɔg] play [pl ̥ej]

leaf [lif]

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Example❖ State the environment in terms of the natural class: [p k] = voiceless stops

❖ Example: /l/ rules in English:

★ /l/ ➙ [l ̥] / a#er a word-initial voiceless stop

★ /l/ ➙ [l] / elsewhere

❖ We don’t need two rules for voiceless /l/:

★ /l/ ➙ [l ̥] / a#er [p]-

★ /l/ ➙ [l ̥] / a#er [k]

★ /l/ ➙ [l ̥] / a#er voiceless stops

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