LING 220 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Free Variation, Minimal Pair, Phoneme
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But phonological processes change t depending on environment. More precisely: [t ] a(cid:374)d [ ] see(cid:373) to (cid:271)e varia(cid:374)ts of t. People mentally store [t] - not its variants. Phonologists have terms to describe same and different sounds. Phoneme: class of sounds that seem to be variants of the same sound ( / / ) Allophone: different realizations of a phoneme in different environments ( [ ] ) Model of how sounds are mentally stored, produced, how/why they vary. Think of it as theoretical vs. applied distinction. [t] [t ] [ ] - what"s produced, applied, performance. We look at their distribution: phonetic environment of a sound. Each type of distribution tells us whether two sounds are. Allophones if they are in complementary or free variation. And they contrast the meaning creating minimal pairs. Minimal pair: words whose pronunciation differ in exactly one sound and that have different meanings.
