LINGUIST 1A03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Complementary Distribution, Phoneme, Allophone
25 Oct 2017
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Sounds can vary in many ways: voicing, tongue placement, manner of articulation, pitch, length. Sounds can differ in voicing: van vs fan, labiodental fricative, v = voiced, f = voiceless, voiced/voiceless is meaningful in some environments but not in others. Sounds can differ in length: free vs free, ca(cid:374) drag out the (cid:862)eeee(cid:863) at the e(cid:374)d. Some variation is meaningful and some is not. Phonology: how sounds are organized within the mental grammar of a language. Fan vs fan: phonetic difference in voicing, this is contrast, f and v are contrastive in english. [f] and [v] are different phonemes in english. Phoneme: a mental category of phonetically similar sounds, phonetic variation within the category is not contrastive. If a phonetic difference leads to a difference in meaning: then it is a phonemic difference. Look for minimal pairs: two words with two different meanings.
