LING 331 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: North American English, Markedness, Phoneme
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Homework 4: it tends to be difficult for some students to figure out what is going on in the data and also to articulate their findings and their theories. Positional neutralization occurs when contextual markedness outranks faithfulness, which outranks context-free markedness. Allophonic variation emerges when contextual markedness outranks context-free markedness outranks faithfulness. Complete neutralization emerges when context-free markedness outranks both contextual markedness and faithfulness. Contrast emerges when faithfulness is ranked on top. Nasal vowels are marked. (cid:523)don(cid:495)t have nasal vowels(cid:524) Oral vowels cannot be followed by nasal vowels. Assign one violation for every [oral vowel][nasal] sequence. Assign one violation for an input segment whose corresponding output segment has a different specification for nasality. Imagine a language like french, where nasality is contrastive. In this language this is the case even before nasals. Now consider a language like english where there is allophonic variation. Nasal vowels occur only before nasals; oral vowels occur elsewhere.
