Lecture 8: Phonology I

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Phonemes

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?

Thai: aspiration can be used to signal meaning contrast

English: meaning contrast never depends on aspiration

Spanish: no aspiration

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.

Thai: 2 phonemes

English: 1 phoneme, varying pronunciation

Spanish: 1 phoneme, fixed pronunciation

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's in the Mental Dictionary?

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.

E. Alternations

1. English vs. Turkish vowels

Phonemes: in this example English has two distinct phonemes, Turkish has just one, which can be pronounced in at least these two different ways.

2. English vs. Serbo-Croatian vowels

[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) &endash; each pronunciation is an allophone of the phoneme

Sound contrasts in a language:

3 possibilities

1. two different phonemes: contrastive

2. pronunciations of single phoneme, in systematic alternation (e.g. English aspiration)

3. pronunciations of single phoneme, in free alternation (e.g. English vowel length)

How to identify phonemes, allophones etc.

1. Can the two sounds signal a meaning contrast?

minimal pairs: only the pair of sounds that we're interested in differ, everything else about the two words is identical.

2. Do the two sounds show systematic alternation, depending on their environment

complementary distribution

i.e., in all environments where sound A is found, sound B is not found

e.g. aspiration in English

	p	ph
syllable-initial	no	yes
following /s/	yes	no
syllable-final	yes	no

3. Do the two sounds appear in identical environments, without signaling a meaning contrast?

If so, then the sounds are in free alternation.