LIN101H1 Lecture 7: Week 7 Lecture Notes Natural Classes
Document Summary
Phonology - the study of sound patterns in a language or dialect. Phoneme - basic contrastive sound in a language (about 37-41 in english). Minimal pair - words that differ in only one sound but that have a different meaning(contrastive) Allophones - different phonetic representations of a sound in a set used to pronounce a single phoneme. Complementary distribution - where if one appears in a certain environment, then the other cannot ex: superman and clark kent. You will never see them at the same time. Phonemes have slashy brackets (/p/) while allophones have square brackets ([p]) The phoneme has several acoustically different phonetic representations(the allophones) but that we hear as the same(as the phoneme) Distributions - their environments -how sounds are distributed. Alternations - how sounds change depending on the environment. We represent their difference with an abstract level and a concrete level: Example from week 7 lecture notes: t and t h are in complementary distribution.
