Linguistics: The Science of Language

Phonology February 6, 2012 chrissy@ling.ed.ac.uk

The Plan
!

Using the IPA: transcription exercises Phonemes and allophones Complimentary and parallel distribution Exercise: identifying phonemes Break? - when this is all depends on how we get on with exercises

Phonetics & Phonology

!

Phonetics: The physical/acoustic properties of linguistic sound How linguistic sounds are perceived How linguistic sounds are produced

Phonology: What sounds are relevant within a language How sounds are organised within a language How sounds can be manipulated within the bounds of a languages phonological rules

Getting comfortable
!

Were going to be using the IPA to understand phonology, and if its still mysterious to you it might prevent you from getting to some important concepts So, well start with a few exercises in actually using the IPA so you can get comfortable with it. Youll want to get out your copy of the IPA for this...or take a new one if you dont have it. Ill give a brief refresher and then well jump in - feel free to make notes on your IPA as youll be referring to this

Consonants
front of mouth

manner of articulation

place of articulation

back of mouth

less restriction

more restriction

voiceless

voiced

Relevant for English

In all Englishes

In some Englishes and that were likely to run into

Affricates
!

Consonants that begin as stops, but release as fricatives. Essentially, they are the combination of a stop and a fricative, but we think of them as a single consonant sound

t + != t! like in choo choo d + " = d" as in judge

What to watch out for

Vowels

rounded unrounded

Examples for vowels

beet i bait e boot u boat o bat b ut ( bit ) bet # p ut $ bore % bot & sofa ' low '$ loud a$ light a) lane e) loin %) leer )' lair #' lure* $'

10

Relevant Vowels (English)

!

Note vowels are a lot more variable between speakers and accents

11

Exercises
!

Were now going to make use of the IPA First, well try to read some IPA, then do our own transcriptions. This latter exercise is a lot like the segmentation we did last week, except this time youll be specifying what the segments are. Some words or phrases we do will exhibit variation, and some will be pretty similar. What you want to look out for is obvious mistakes, mostly based on reverting to the Roman alphabet

12

Identify
!

Write the following words in regular orthography:

/hit/ /strok/ /fez/ /ton/ /boni/ /skrim/ /frut/ /prit!'r/ /kr&k/

heat stroke faze tone bony scream fruit preacher krock

13

Find the errors

!

This is a section of the poem The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll in IPA - there is a glaring error in each line. Find it and correct it!

*' t&jm hz c(m *' w&lrus sed tu t%lk+'v m#ni+,)-z 'v+!uz+&nd+!)ps nd sil)- wx d" 'v kb'g'z+nd k)-z z nd waj+*' si+)s b%jl)- h&t * nd w#,'r p)gz hv w)-z k ' ks

*' t&jm hz k(m *' w&lr's sed tu t%k+'v m#ni+,)-z 'v+!uz+nd+!)ps nd sil)- wks 'v kb'd"'z+nd k)-z nd waj+*' si+)z b%jl)- h&t nd w#*'r p)gz hv w)-z
14

Transcribe
physics f)ziks merry Mary Mairi yellow sticky me.i m.i m/i j#lo st)ki marry m.i transcription tease weather whether coat heath your name t.nsk.)p!(n tiz w#*. w#*. kot hi, k.)si

15

Phonology
!

Break? Now that were comfortable with the IPA, Ill introduce some of the core concepts of phonology Then well have a look at another - more complex - exercise.

16

Phonology
!

As youll recall, phonology is the study of the sound systems of particular languages or language families Can also refer to an individuals knowledge of their languages sound system This knowledge tells which sounds are permitted and which are not, which are important and which are irrelevant. Crucial to these rules is the concept of a phoneme.

17

Phonemes
!

A phoneme is a particular segment (or phone) which makes a difference in meaning, but does not contain meaning. The easiest way to identify distinct phonemes is by using the minimal pair test
!

Two words which vary in only one segment - does that variation in sound mean a variation in meaning?

/pt/ /bt/

The only difference in these two words is the rst segment, and they have different meanings, so /p/ and / b/ are separate phonemes.

18

Phonemes
!

A phoneme is a particular segment which makes a difference in meaning, but does not contain meaning. The easiest way to identify distinct phonemes is by using the minimal pair test
!

Two words which vary in only one segment - does that variation in sound mean a variation in meaning?

The rst segment is different here as well, but it makes no difference in h /p t/ meaning - only makes pronunciation sound a bit strange. /pt/
19

Phonemes
!

A phoneme is a particular segment which makes a difference in meaning, but does not contain meaning. The easiest way to identify distinct phonemes is by using the minimal pair test
!

Two words which vary in only one segment - does that variation in sound mean a variation in meaning?

Minimal pairs have to share some features (e.g., close place or manner, voicing) - this is what makes them minimally different. So, for example, cat and fat are not a minimal pair because they vary drastically in voicing, place and manner

20

Phonemes
!

So, we have a way to identify phonemes, but were also interested in sounds that dont make a difference in meaning, but are there nonetheless, like aspiration. Sounds which vary, but do not make a difference in meaning are called allophones. In English, [p] and [p ] are allophones of the phoneme /p/ In ones phonology, phonemes are the sounds we actually consider separate, while allophones are the actual variants we may use in practice. A phoneme can have more than two allophones A phoneme can also be an allophone of another [t] phoneme
h

[st&p] [p )n]
h

/p/ [p] [p ]
h

/t/
h

[t ] [d] [/]
21

Phonemic & Phonetic Transcription

!

This is where the dashes and brackets come into play /Phonemic/ transcription only considers the relevant phonemes in the language, without describing allophonic detail. [Phonetic] transcription involves more detail including allophonic variants - this is where you may see things like diacritics.

22

/Phonemic Transcription/

23

[Phonetic Transcription]

24

Phonemes & Allophones

!

Many English phonemes have allophones, and these are often due to assimiliation, a type of phonological conditioning In assimilation, a segment takes on characteristics of its neighbouring segments. For example, many English vowel phonemes have two allophones: a nasalised variant and a non nasalised variant

/i/
!

[0] [b0n] bean [i] [bid] bead

When the vowel occurs before a nasal consonant, it takes on the nasality.
25

Phonemes & Allophones

!

We can actually phrase this as a phonological rule:

!

A vowel changes to a nasal vowel where it occurs before a nasal consonant We can also formalise this rule in fancy phonological notation

a vowel

to become nasal

in the space before

consonant

V -----> [+nasal] /__ [+nasal C]

changes where it occurs a nasal

26

Language Variation
!

While two languages may have the same set of segments or phones, this does not mean they have the same phonemes Nasalised vowels occur in both English and French, but in French they are phonemic - they can make a difference in meaning.
!

gare vs gant (station and glove)

/g/ /g1/

27

Phonological Rules
!

A languages phonology can be described by identifying its allophones and phonemes But we can also think about what are and are not possible sound combinations. Why is it that blick could be an English word but ngepk could not? The phonotactics of English do not allow it - e.g., some sounds can only be syllable nal (e.g., /-/) This is the source of some common L2 problems; e.g., the consonant cluster /sp/ cannot be word initial in Spanish unless it is preceded by a vowel, hence, Espaa - speakers bring this to English
28

Phonotactic Rules
!

Discerning the phonotactic rules of a language requires access to a large portion of the language system, through either raw data or a native speaker who you can pester with specic questions Once you know the phonemes, you can analyse how they are distributed, which will reveal illegal clusters or environments for certain phonemes. This task is ideal for a computer if it has access to a lot of raw data But is the minimal pair test enough for us to nd relevant phonemes in an unknown language?

29

Minimal Pairs: A problem

!

The minimal pair test works well for identifying most English phonemes
!

cat and gat, rat and lat, sap and zap, rap and tap, etc etc

However, not every phoneme has a convenient minimal pair. We know * and , are separate phonemes, but whats the minimal pair?
!

Its thigh and thy - the only one for this pair, and its archaic.

/*a)/ /,a)/

30

Identifying Phonemes
!

What do we do if the language doesnt have many monosyllabic words (e.g., Turkish)? What if we dont have access to a lot of data from the language, but wed still like to discover something about its phonology? How do we identify phonemes and allophones in the absence of minimal pairs? We can examine the distribution of segments across words, drawing on what we know about how phonemes and allophones work to identify them.

31

Segment Distribution
!

Allophones are in complimentary distribution - because they are usually phonologically conditioned, different allophones occur in complimentary (different) phonological environments
!

If two similar segments occur in different environments, they are allophones.

On the other hand, phonemes occur in paralell distribution: like paralell lines going in the same direction, phonemes occurr in the same environment
!

If two similar segments occur in the same place, e.g., word initially, in two similar words, they are phonemes

32

Segment Distribution
!

/p/ [p] [p ]
h

For example, [p] and [p ] are in complimentary distribution. [p] is the default, [ph] occurs whenever the segment is the only consonant before a stressed vowel. In fact, this applies for all voiceless stops.

[st&p] [p )n]
h

[-voice+stop]C---->[+aspiration]/_[+stressed]V
!

However, if you think about /p/ and /b/, they both occur word initailly before a vowel - in the same sort of place, in paralell distribution.

/but/ /p)n/

33

Distinguishing Allophones & Phonemes

Are the two sounds in complimentary distribution?
yes no

Are they phonetically similar?

yes no

Minimal pair test: can swapping sounds change meaning?

yes no

Allophones of a single phoneme

Separate Phonemes

Segments in free variation*

34

es s

The process
!

The easiest thing to do rst is check for minimal pairs - then you know you have phonemes - so with data, we would do this rst. Absent this, we would begin to ask questions about distribution To do this, we would want to
!

list all the segments separate vowels and consonants and classify all the segments list the environments in which the segments occurr try to make generalisations about the environment try to derive overall distribution and rules

35

Terminology Spotcheck
!

Phone/Segment: A distinct sound Phoneme: A segment which makes a difference in meaning Minimal Pair: A set of words which contrast in meaning and in only one segment, demonstrating existence of phonemes Allophone: Variants of a phoneme which do not make a difference in meaning Phonotactics: The rules of how phonemes can be combined and where they can occur Phonemic Transcription: Uses only the phonemes, no allophones Phonetic Transcription: Includes detail about allophonic variants Phonological Conditioning: When a segment changes (to an allophone) due to its phonological environment Assimilation: A type of phonological conditioning where a phoneme takes on characteristics of its phonological environment Complimentary Distribution: When segments occur in different environments indicates allophony Paralell Distribution: When segments occur in similar environments - indicates phonemes
36

Try it.
!

Lets have a try at using a minimal dataset to discover a phonology

!

minimal pair test? list all the segments separate vowels and consonants and classify all the segments list the environments in which the segments occurr try to make generalisations about the environment try to derive overall distribution and rules

37