Review Notes 2 Flashcards
What phenomena do we see when we compare CLA across languages?
Children learn (and struggle) with different phenomena, depending on the language that they’re learning.
What evidence supports the theory that children only learn the language around them?
Children learn features in different orders, depending on the language they learn.
What is Markedness?
Markedness is a notion that refers to issues in structural complexity, phonetic complexity, and linguistic typology.
What purpose does Markedness serve?
It helps us distinguish (Complex/difficult/rare) from (simple/easy/frequent)
What makes Markedness complicated?
Features that are complex are not always rare, and features that are frequent are not always simple.
Why is Markedness not a good predictor for language behaviour?
It is too vague. We don’t know how it affects language acquisition, and we don’t know how universal markedness relates to language-specific markedness.
What assumption can we make about features, regardless of UG?
That we use them; features are part of virtually all phonological analyses.
What did Distinctive Feature Theory do?
It identified the phonetic dimensions that encode lexical contrasts and phonological patterns in human languages.
Where do we find the earliest use of phonological features?
Trubetzkoy’s work; in an attempt to encode and reduce phonological contrasts (minimal pairs).
Why do we use the term distinctive and not contrastive?
Because we only need to identify features as separate from other sounds; they don’t need to contrast.
When we see contrasts in sets of pairs, what should we expect?
For each feature to have a partner.
Why does this theory of Contrast help us in Turkish?
It reduces 28 binary relations to three features. (high, back, round)
What are the two components of a feature?
Articulatory and Acoustic.
What do we mean when we talk about Binarity? Why do we like it?
Phonological features often encode binary relations, and phonologists like this because it creates an elegant theory.
What do we mean when we talk about Universality? Why might we like it?
The theory of Universality implies that there is a universal set of features across languages. We like it because it makes cross-linguistic analyses possible.
