Homework 8: Phonology

Posted Wednesday October 29th, due Tuesday November 4th.

The reading for the coming week is Chapter 6 of Fromkin & Rodman's textbook, on Phonology.

You should the following 4 exercises from the textbook (I recommend doing them in the order given here, rather than the order in the book).

1. Exercise 5 (p.267): Minimal Pairs.

Note: you should try to find minimal pairs for all three environments: (i) word/syllable initial; (ii) medial, i.e. between two vowels; (iii) word/syllable final.

2. Exercise 3 (p.266): Vowels in an English dialect

Note: you should *really* follow the pronunciations that are given here, which quite likely will not correspond to your own English pronounciations (particularly column A). This is, however, a real dialect of English, which is widely used in some parts of the northern United States, ... and I have noticed that it is also spoken by some students in this class.

part (a): to answer the question, you just need to say what phonetic property the final sound of all the words in column A have in common, and what (other) phonetic property the final sound of all the words in column B have in common.

part (d): read the directions for part (b) of Exercise 2 (p. 265-6) for some guidance on answering this question.

part (e): this is asking for the phonetic (not phonemic) representation (using IPA) of these words, in the dialect used in the question, not your own dialect. You should be able to predict the pronunciation based on your answers to the earlier parts.

part (f): the chapter contains many examples of the format for writing phonological rules.

3. Exercise 4 (p.266-7): Palatalizing English Consonants

You can answer this by writing a separate rule for each of [t], [d], [s], and [z]. But you should also be able to collapse these into a single rule which will cover all four cases, by referring in your rule to phonetic features that they all share.

4. Exercise 1 (p.265): Korean r/l distribution

Note: this exercise will be much easier if you break the Korean words into syllables.