LINGUIS 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Vowel Reduction, Dissimilation, Vocal Folds

• School: UW-Madison
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LINGUIS 101
• Professor: Becky Shields

Document Summary

Phonetic info that may be combined w/ segments in a non-sequential way. Pitch: voice on a scale (high to low) Singing- can train yourself to hit a. Everyone can naturally modulate pitch, high or lower. Pitch modulation that signals diff grammatical/semantic info. Message/meaning is the same, but intonation is diff. In some languages, changing pitch of (single syllable) word can change meaning of word itself. Single syllable words, only differ in pitch. It is actually very common- most languages in the world are tone languages. Register: pitch stays even and steady throughout syllable. Limited number within a language, up to 5. Contour: either rise, fall or both (change in pitch) over course of syllable. In some languages, segment length can change word meaning ie: hungarian, japanese, finnish, cree, danish. Can lengthen vowels (more common) and consonants. See slideshow on canvas for sound examples. No language uses loudness by itself (contrastingly) to change meaning of a word.