Phonology Flashcards
Phonology
Study of the acceptable combination of sounds and finer features of a language
Phoneme
Distinctive sounds
Contrastive distribution
Distribution unpredictable
Minimal pair
Sounds in contrastive distribution
Change one sound to get a new word
Allophone
Sound in complementary distribution
Can formulate the rules that create them
Distribution unpredictable
Shared a phonetic feature with phoneme
Symbol of an environment
_
«_»=position of sound
«#»=word boundary
«C»=any consonant
«V»=any vowel
_C
…
How to represent a sound environment
/ /->[ ]/influence_(influence)
/k/->[ts]_(front vowel)
Phonotactics
All language restrict the permissible combination of morphemes
Very language specific but change overtime
Syllables
Intermediary between sound and word
Combinations restricted by language
(C) V (C)
(C) V
…
Nucleus
Vowel in a syllable obligatory
Onset
Consonant coming before a vowel in a syllable
Coda
Consonant coming after a vowel in a syllable
Open syllable
Nothing after vowel
Closed syllable
Consonant after vowel
Syllabic consonant
Nasals: m/n/ng
Laterlas: l
Depend of speaker, speed of speech and accent
Suprasegmental features
Word stress
Useful to divide stream of speech into recognizable words
Stressed syllable symbol
‘
Fixed stressed language
The stressed syllable is generally always the same
Variable stress language
The placement of word stress is largely unpredictable
4 levels of stress
- primary stress: one syllable is always more prominent than rest (non-content words are stressed sometimes)
- secondary stress: polysyllabic words have a second stress weaker than the primary
- sentence stress (prosodic stress) last content word is stressed
Tone
=change of pitch
Express emotions, attitudes
But some languages are tonal
Intonation
Rise and fall of voice
Indicates emotions, attitude
Differentiate statement, question
Emphasize
Intonation (5 kinds)
- falling: drop pitch, used in turn-taking
- rising: rise pitch, non final. Yes/no question, open questions, disbelief
- monotone intonation: routine, list
- fall-rise: hesitancy, doubt
- rise-fall: strong feeling of (dis-) approval, definiteness of info
