LING101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Free Variation, Minimal Pair, Complementary Distribution
Document Summary
Native speakers generally think of sounds at the phonemic level. When comparing the speech sounds of a language, we can classify their relative distribution as one of the following: 2 sounds occur in the same environment. Replacing one sound with the other can change a word"s meaning. Provide evidence that 2 phones are in contrastive distribution. Two contrastive phones are allophones of different phonemes. Two non-contrastive phones are allophones of the same phoneme. With the same number of sound segments. Same number of sound segments, differ in segment only, but have the. The sound that differs is in free variation, but they are not contrastive. Two sounds are in free variation when. They occur in the same environment, and. Replacing one with the other does not change the meaning. Sounds in free variation are allophones of the same phoneme. Occur in predictable environments (with respect to each other) Sounds in complementary distribution are allophones of the same phoneme.