LING 220 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Phoneme, Mental Representation, Voiced Alveolar Fricative
Document Summary
Our goal: determine whether two sounds are phonemes or allophones of the same phoneme. This tells us about the mental organization of sounds. Which sounds are mentally stored vs. product of articulation (map of the mind) We can achieve our goal by looking at the distribution of sounds: Contrastive distribution: if sounds occur in the same environment, and using one rather than the other changes the meaning -> separate phonemes. [b t] (cid:448)s. [p t] -> /b/ and /p/ are separate phonemes. Complementary distribution: if sounds occur in mutually exclusive contexts -> two allophones of same phoneme. For complementary distribution, one phoneme is the default, the other occurs in a conditioned environment. There is a phonetic context which forces one phoneme to be pronounced in a systematically different way. If you don"t find them, what do you know. Step 2: if you don"t find minimal pairs, you need to discover which is the exceptional pronunciation and what forces its pronunciation.
