Lecture 15: Phonology ILecture 15: Phonology I
When we discussed syntax and morphology, we saw that we can describe the components of sentences at various levels: morphemes, words, phrases. Similarly, in phonology we're interested in the ways in which sounds combine to form words, and there are again a number of different levels of description. [Note: one difference between syntax and phonology is that we don't find recursion in phonology ... you will never find one syllable that is a sub-part of another larger syllable.]
Generalizations or rules about how sounds can be combined to create words hold at each of the levels below.
| p | t | k |
| pr: pray | tr: tray | kr: crumble |
| spr: sprint | str: strike | skr: scramble |
| pl: play | tl: --- | kl: clap |
| spl: splat | stl: --- | scl: sclerosis |
...but if [tl] and [stl] sequences are impossible, how do we account for the [tl] and [stl] sequences in the following English words? Answer: the sequences are here not in one syllable, e.g. the [t] of 'butler' is at the end of the first syllable, and the [l] is at the start of the second syllable. Therefore, this is quite consistent with what English allows.
Generalization about words in Twi: "a word may only end in a vowel or a nasal consonant"
Therefore, which of the following are "possible words" in Twi?
Form of Japanese syllables*: consonant-vowel-(nasal).
Words borrowed into Japanese from English are adjusted to fit the required syllable shape of Japanese. This typically involves inserting vowels to break up consonant clusters, or inserting a word final vowel to prevent the occurrence of a word-final consonant. [In addition, some segments are changed, to fit the available segments in Japanese, e.g. v --> b, l --> r, th --> s/z]
[*this may be glossing over some details of Japanese phonology, but it is good enough for our purposes here.]
English plural morpheme
English past tense morpheme
Generalization: value of [±voice] feature must be same for suffix
and final segment of stem
English is like Thai and different from Spanish, in that both English and Thai speakers produce aspirated and unaspirated stops. Spanish speakers produce only unaspirated stops.
Is English really like Thai?
The difference between English and Thai is in the phonemes of the two languages. Where Thai has two different phonemes, English has just one /p/ phoneme, which has two distinct pronunciations [known as allophones], depending on where the /p/ occurs.
Note: as a convention in linguistics, to make it easier to distinguish between whether people are talking about phonemes or phonetic representations, phonemic representations are enclosed in slashes, e.g. /p/, whereas phonetic representations are enclosed in square brackets, e.g. [p].
What do English speakers' memorize about aspiration?
English speakers don't need to memorize whether a /p/ (or a /t/, or a /k/) is aspirated in any word ... all they need to know is the pronunciation rule that say that voiceless stops are aspirated in syllable-initial position.
...and Thai speakers?
Thai speakers, on the other hand, need to memorize for every word containing a voiceless stop whether it is aspirated or not.
Phonemes: in this example English has two distinct phonemes, Turkish has just one, which can be pronounced in at least these two different ways.
[note: the colon notation after a vowel means that the vowel is long]
Phonemes: Serbo-Croatian has two phonemes, /a/ and /a:/; English, on the other hand, has just one phoneme /a/, and it can be pronounced either long or short.
The phonetic distinction is possible in both languages
The distinction is phonemic in just one of the two languages
One phoneme with two (or more pronunciations) each pronunciation is an allophone of the phoneme
3 possibilities
minimal pairs: only the pair of sounds that we're interested in
differ, everything else about the two words is identical.
e.g. aspiration in English
| p | ph | |
| syllable-initial | no | yes |
| following /s/ | yes | no |
| syllable-final | yes | no |
If so, then the sounds are in free alternation.