LING 221 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Complementary Distribution, Underlying Representation, Phoneme
1 Nov 2017
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Document Summary
Phonology: the behaviour of sounds within a patterned cognitive system. Segmental phonology: how sounds relate to one another in linear strings. Phonotactics: which sounds are allowed to touch each other. Alternations: a word or morpheme may be pronounced in different ways depending of the context. Underlying representation: the mental rules that we have that govern how certain sounds are pronounced. Our phonological knowledge influences what we produce and what we perceive. Phoneme: a label for a set of sounds that count as basically the same: positional variants versus contrast in meaning. If two sounds are contrastive, they are phonemes. Allophones: positional or contextual variants of a sound: allophones of a phoneme never appear in the same environment. If two sounds are in complementary distribution they are more likely allophones. Distribution is predictable and non-contrastive: context is important. Minimal pairs: two words that differ in only a single sound in the same position within the word.
