LING 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Complementary Distribution, Distinctive Feature, Phoneme
22 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Phonology: study of the way in which speech sounds form systems and patterns in human language. Importance of phonology shown by the fact that one can change one word into another simply by changing one sound i. e. sip --> zip; chunk --> junk; fine --> vine. Contrast words: different sounds contrast when their presence alone distinguishes between otherwise identical forms. Distinctive sounds: describes linguistic elements that contrast (voice is a distinctive phonetic feature of consonants) Two words that differ by only one segment found in the same position in each word. Distinct sounds that occur in minimal pairs or minimal sets are phonemes since they contrast meaning. [b], [d], and [g] are all phonemes in english and bill/dill/grill constitute a minimal set. [u] and [ j] are phonemes of english, they contrast meanings in other minimal pairs. Dipthongs [aj], [aw] and [ j] are considered single vowel sounds, although both contain glides because they function like the monophthongal vowels.
