LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Hippopotamus, Syllabification, Accidental Gap
23 Jun 2018
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-“Suspicious” pairs
-Minimal pair test: diagnostic we use in every language to figure out if two sounds are separate
phonemes or allophones
-When sounds are allophones they are phonetically similar
-Only sounds that are phonetically similar are potentially allophones grouped to the same
phoneme
-When we investigate a language, two sounds that are phonetically similar are a suspicious pair.
E.g. [t] and [d] are a suspicious pair: because they are both stops, have the same manner and
place of articulation. Glottal state is the only difference.
-They differ in only one feature - voicing (identical place and manner of articulation; alveolar
stops)
-[f] and [v] differ only in voice
-[l] and [fricative r] both are liquids, differ in lateral vs/retroflex
-[k] and [aspirated k] differ only in aspiration
-[k] and [g] differ only in voice
-[z] and [k] will never be allophones in any language, very different from one another
-The last two are not a suspicious pair! —> one is alveolar, the other velar, one is fricative, the
other a stop..!
-If a language has those two sounds, they necessarily belong to separate phonemes!
-Interim conclusion
-Phoneme:
-The basic sounds of a language
-The way in which sounds are constructed, -and stored in the mind (equivalence class)
-The contrastive phonological units of a language (they can bring forth the contrast and
meaning)
-Allophone:
-The precise way in which sounds are pronounced
-The predictable variants of the language’s phonemes (can predict whether a sound will be
aspirated or not from the context)
-Every human language has a phonemic inventory (inventory differs from one language to
another)
-The minimal pair test establishes which sounds are contrastive. i.e phonemes, for any given
language
-Phonemes can have several allophones
-English clear ‘l’ and dark ‘l’ (velarized ‘l)
-Dark l indicated by an l with a squiggle
—> Clear l in words such as cloud, land and alone
—> Dark l in words such as spill, hell and call (at the end of the word, velarized l - you raise
your velum)
-Clear and dark l are in complementary distribution
-l-velarisation hypothesis 1:
—> clear l becomes dark l or velarized l when occurring in word final position. The clear l is the
basic phoneme but sometimes it becomes velarized
-Testing hypothesis 1:
-Hypothesis 1 predicts how l is pronounced phonetically in the various environments
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Document Summary
Minimal pair test: diagnostic we use in every language to figure out if two sounds are separate phonemes or allophones. When sounds are allophones they are phonetically similar. Only sounds that are phonetically similar are potentially allophones grouped to the same phoneme. When we investigate a language, two sounds that are phonetically similar are a suspicious pair. [t] and [d] are a suspicious pair: because they are both stops, have the same manner and place of articulation. They differ in only one feature - voicing (identical place and manner of articulation; alveolar stops) [l] and [fricative r] both are liquids, differ in lateral vs/retroflex. [k] and [aspirated k] differ only in aspiration. [z] and [k] will never be allophones in any language, very different from one another. The last two are not a suspicious pair! > one is alveolar, the other velar, one is fricative, the other a stop!
