Lecture 9 Flashcards
What is a phonetic difference?
Phonetic differences refers to the properties of individual phones that allow us to distinguish one from the other and thereby create different words. Mainly to do with significant and insignificant difference between phones.
What is contrast?
Contrast means that the difference between two phones IS sufficient to create distinct words.
Give examples of some contrastive phones in English
Down vs Town
She [{i:] vs See/Sea [si:]
What is a minimal pair?
A minimal pair is two words with the same sequence of sounds with a single exception, where this single phonetic difference is enough to create two distinct words with different meanings (in that language)
What is minimal pair the shorthand for?
“A pair of words where there is the minimum phonetic difference between them that also have different meanings.”
The minimum being one obviously
So a pair of different words with one sound difference
Non-contrastive
When the difference between two phones is NOT used to differentiate words in a language, the phones do not contrast/are non-contrastive in that language.
Eg [l] and [r] in Japanese are non-contrastive or [b] and [v] although not totally sure that [v] ever occurs in Japanese
What is a phoneme?
A phoneme is a set of phones in a particular language where the difference between them is NOT used to distinguish words in that language.
It arranges non-contrastive phones into sets and separates contrasting phones
What is an allophone?
An allophone is
What is a phonetic description of a language?
Identifies:
All the phones that occur in that language,
How the phones are organised to create different words,
How/which phones are used create distinct words in that language,
The general principles about how sounds can be sequenced in that language.
Focus on phonetic differences
