LIN100Y1 Lecture 5: Handout 5
Document Summary
Readings: o"grady & archibald, chapter 3, sections 3. 5 and 3. 6: rules and derivations. Two types of segments: phonemes - contrastive phonological units that affect word meaning; an abstract mental image of a sound, allophones - non-contrastive, predictable variants of phonemes; a concrete realization of the phoneme. It is assumed that we store in the mental lexicon (in the brain) only unpredictable information about words, i. e. phonemic representations. All predictable information (the phonetic form) can be freely derived in the process of speech production. This derivation is performed using rules formal statements about how phonemes of the underlying representation are converted to allophones of the phonetic representation. Take, for example, english nasalized vowels discussed in the previous lecture. These vowels are completely predictable they always occur before nasal consonants, e. g. in chant [ nt] but not in chat [ t]. before nasal consonants before oral consonants (elsewhere)
