WLC 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Velar Nasal, Minimal Pair
Document Summary
Individually, phonemes do not have meaning but when grouped together they can have meaning. The arrangement of sounds is what gives the sounds meaning. You can create an infinite number of meanings with a limited number of sounds. Phone: any speech sound, no matter its role in the language. Phones are produced at a rapid pace, and meaning comes almost instantaneously. Look for commonalities between two phones being compared. Look for minimal pairs (if you find even one minimal pair they are phonemes) Positional variants (does one occur in only one position, while the other occurs in another) Phonotactics: what sounds may go together, in what order, with what intonation and stress. A problem may say that two sounds are allophones of each other, state the distribution. A problem may ask whether two sounds are allophones of each or phonemes. Aspirate /p/ occurs before a stressed vowel and in-aspirate /p/ occurs following an /s/