LING101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Contrastive Distribution, Complementary Distribution, Phonetics
25 Feb 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Phonology: study of the sunds systems of languages and the mental representation of sounds.
From Phonology to Phonetics
Phonology is the starting point, while phonetics is the output of phonology.
Phonological rules changes sounds from mental representations into phonetic forms.
Letter Analogy
Ex. The single letter “a” is written as “a” or “A” in accordance with the following
set of rules.
Use “A” at the beginning of a sentence.
Use “A” at the beginning of a proper noun.
Use “a” elsewhere.
Phonemes and Allophones
A speech sound in isolation is a phone.
The mental representation of a sound is a phoneme.
Allophones are phonetic realizations of phonemes.
Allophones are generally minimally distinct from phonemes.
A phoneme consist of one or more allophones.
Every speech sound we produce is an allophone of some phoneme.
Allophones are written between square brackets [ ].
Phonemes are written between forward slashes / /.
Types of Distributions
When we are comparing the speech sounds of a language, we can classify their relative
distribution as one of the following
Contrastive
Complementary
Free variation
Contrastive Distribution
Two sounds are contrastive when they occur in the same environment and replacing one
sound with the other can change a word’s meaning.
Two contrastive phones are allophones of different phonemes.
Two non-contrastive phones are allophones of the same phoneme
Contrastive Distribution(Minimal Pairs)
Minimal pairs provide evidence that two phones are in contrastive distribution.
A minimal pairs is two words with the same number of sound segments, and
which differ in segment only, and which have different meaning. Ex. bean→ mean, mud--
>thud
Complementary Distribution
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Phonology is the starting point, while phonetics is the output of phonology. Phonological rules changes sounds from mental representations into phonetic forms. Phonology: study of the sunds systems of languages and the mental representation of sounds. Use a at the beginning of a sentence. Use a at the beginning of a proper noun. The single letter a is written as a or a in accordance with the following. A speech sound in isolation is a phone. The mental representation of a sound is a phoneme. A phoneme consist of one or more allophones. Every speech sound we produce is an allophone of some phoneme. Allophones are written between square brackets [ ]. Phonemes are written between forward slashes / /. When we are comparing the speech sounds of a language, we can classify their relative. Types of distributions distribution as one of the following. Two sounds are contrastive when they occur in the same environment and replacing one.
