LING 331 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Asteroid Family, Complementary Distribution, North American English
Document Summary
Phonology is a theory which explains the systematic variation in the pronunciation of morphemes. Two different formalisms which instantiate this theory: spe and ot. Today we begin to examine the nature of the representations in the light of spe and in the light of ot. Three items to discuss over the next couple of weeks: phonemes, features, and syllables. Phonemes are abstract categories of speech sounds which are hypothesized to be psychologically real. Psychological reality: if you want to do a scientific investigation, you need to have things that you can observe and way to manipulate those things. In language, the things that you want to observe are mostly hidden. All you can observe are the result of these things (results of things going on in our brains before we produce speech) we are trying to equate psychological phenomenon with physical phenomenon.
