LIN229H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Complementary Distribution, Minimal Pair, Phoneme
Document Summary
A means by which the phonemes of a language are determined: how a language divides two sounds into different phonemes, describes what a phoneme/allophone is in a language. Inventory: each language has a finite number of contrastive sounds (only so many phonemes: fixed inventory many different ranges for number of phonemes. What is contrastive in one language (or a variety of a language) is not necessarily contrastive in another: difficult to learn/train the brain that different sounds are the same or same sounds are different. Minimal pairs: two words that only differ in a single sound. Minimal pairs used to find out if two sounds are contrastive or not (different words or not) The difference between minimal pairs is the two sounds in question: e. g. , tire and dire ; two and do . When given data, first find minimal pairs. The sounds of a language are organized into a segmental inventory.
