LIN 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Minimal Pair, Phoneme, Morphophonology
Linguistics
Minimal Pairs:
• One of the most robust tools for examining phonemes is the minimal pair.
• A minimal pair is a pair of words which differ only in one segment.
• In some case, it may by chance be impossible to find a minimal pair for two phonemes
even though they clearly contrast.
• In many cases it is possible to find near-minimal pairs, where the words are so similar
that it is unlikely that any environment is conditioning an allophone.
Morphophonology:
• Morphophonology (or morphophonemics) looks at how morphology (the structure of
words) interacts with phonology.
• In morphophonology one may talk about underlying or morpho-phonemic representations
of words, which is a level of abstraction beneath the phonemic level.
• The level of abstraction above the phoneme is known as an underlying or morpho-
phonemic representation
• The parallelism between the morpho-phonemic layer and the phonemic layer should be
clear. Just like how phonemes surface as phones conditioned by their environment,
underlying segments surface as phonemes.
• The important difference is that the surfacing of morpho-phonemic segments as
phonemes occurs after morphological processes
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