LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Voiceless Alveolar Fricative, Nasal Consonant, Phoneme
The Illusion of speech-Discreteness
● “We hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that
matches some entry in our mental lexicon”
Summing up last time
● Sounds are composed of features that roughly correspond to articulatory gestures used
to produce the sounds
● The IPA provides unambiguous symbols for speech sounds organized according to
major phonetic parameters of voicing, place and manner of articulation
● In actual speech, sounds aren’t separate/discrete units; Discrete categories imposed by
our mental lexicons
English plural morphemes
● Plural morpheme ‘s’ sounds different when in ‘cats’, ‘dogs’, and ‘boxes’
○ Three different allomorphs
○ [s] when stem final sounds are voiceless (consonant)
○ [z] when stem final sounds are voiced (consonant)
○ [əz] stem final sounds are all sibilants
● Rule or memorized forms?
○ We can test this by making up words (Wug test)
○ Distribution of allomorphs is governed by rules
● Sounds or features??
○ List of sounds hypothesis: the plural morpheme is pronounced as [s] after [t, p, k,
f, etc]
○ Feature hypothesis: The plural morpheme is pronounced [s] after a [-voice, -
sibilant]
○ If the rule appllies to a sound that’s not a part of the list in LSH (a voiceless
nonsibilant that’s not English) but meets description in the FH, then FH is correct
■ Pluralize “Bach”-> “Bachs” (german [x] is a voiceless velar fricative)
■ Feature hypothesis is correct
● Phonological Rules
○ Rules used by speakers to pronounce morphemes in their language
○ The fact that we extend a rule to a sound that isn’t in our language supports that
the rule is feature-based (not a list of sounds)
○ Affect sounds that share a particular feature or features (natural classe, E.g.
voiced voiceless, sibilant) and not arbitrary sets of sounds
● Back to plural morpheme rule
○ Is there a pattern to why the sounds are assigned to their categories?
● Voicing Assimilation
○ Cats
■ [t] - [s] (voiceless-voiceless)
○ Dogs
■ [g] - [z] (voiced-voiced)
○ Ease of articulation: tendency to prolong an articulatory gesture (e.g. voicing)
gives rise to assimilation, a kind of phonological processs
● The English morpheme -in (not)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
We hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental lexicon . Sounds are composed of features that roughly correspond to articulatory gestures used to produce the sounds. The ipa provides unambiguous symbols for speech sounds organized according to major phonetic parameters of voicing, place and manner of articulation. In actual speech, sounds aren"t separate/discrete units; discrete categories imposed by our mental lexicons. Plural morpheme s" sounds different when in cats", dogs", and boxes". [s] when stem final sounds are voiceless (consonant) [z] when stem final sounds are voiced (consonant) We can test this by making up words (wug test) Distribution of allomorphs is governed by rules. List of sounds hypothesis: the plural morpheme is pronounced as [s] after [t, p, k, f, etc] Feature hypothesis: the plural morpheme is pronounced [s] after a [-voice, - sibilant]
