Homework #5: Phonology

Posted Monday September 28th; due Tuesday October 6th in class.

These exercises will give you valuable practice for the first in-class test. We will discuss them at the review sessions on Wednesday October 7th.

The numbers of all of the exercises below refer to the exercises in Fromkin & Rodman, Chapter 7, pp.306-312.

(1) Exercise 1: 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.

Tips:

• In order for a pair of words to be a minimal pair, they must differ in exactly one sound. If they differ in any more than this, then they are no longer minimal. So, for example, 'mad' and 'gnat' are not a minimal pair.
• Beware of the temptation to use English as spelling as a guide ... as we know, English spelling can be very misleading. So, for example, 'love' and 'lobe' are not a minimal pair, because the vowels are different. Another misleading consequence of English spelling is that word-medial letters often correspond to word-final sounds, e.g. [n] in "line" is the final sound of the word, although the "n" is not the final letter of the word.

(2) Exercise 3: Korean liquids

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

(3) Exercise 4: Korean alveolar fricatives

(4) Exercise 5: Southern Kongo

Note: use examples of phonological rules discussed in the chapter for guidance on this question. You do not need to answer part (b) of this question.

(5) Exercise 6: 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.

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): no need to answer this part of the 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.

(6) Exercise 13: Maninka "-li" suffix