LING 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Phoneme, Vocal Tract, Alveolar Consonant

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 201
• Professor: Alex Drummond

Document Summary

Features: quiz this friday, available online through mycourses, open in the afternoon for 24 hours -> until saturday afternoon. Just the phonetic section so far: open book. Topics: features of vowels and consonants, defining natural classes, using features to constrain rules, summary. Independent articulatory parameters: height, backness, rounding, tense, the more parameters used, the fewer possible sounds, the fewer parameters used, the more possible sounds, we use parameters to pick out sets and subsets of sounds. Distinctive features: correspond to independently controllable phonetic parameters, features are abstract and categorical, binary (+ or -, motivated by phoneme inventory, and the processes exhibited. Example: vowels [high] and [low: used to classify high, low and mid vowels. [+low] low vowels: segments are described as feature matrices. [+/- consonantal: obstruction to the vocal tract. [+/- syllabic: can be a syllable peak. [+/- strident: a lot of high frequency noise. What is this used for: writing rules, classifying.