LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Optimality Theory, Universal Grammar, Phoneme

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 100
• Professor: Clifford Burgess

Document Summary

Phonetics: acoustic phonetics: deals with sound waves and how we interpret them, articulatory phonetics: examines the physiological side of things [i. e. , how sounds are made] No language is purely alphabetic, i. e. , one in which there is only a single symbol for each sound. International phonetic alphabet [ipa] developed in 19th century. The singular merit of ipa is that it allows the same sound to be represented by a single symbol irrespective of the languages involved. [aw] as in cloud (a low back sound) Spectrogram can be used in forensic analyses to help figure out who said what (courts take rather dim view of this) Suprasegmental aspects of speech e. g. , stress, rhythm, intonation. Not what you say, but how you say it . Related to phonetics, but concerned with instead with the patterning of speech instead: speech sounds within a language will contrast, e. g. , bit and beat have contrasting vowel sounds and mean different things.