Week 13 - Allophonic Variants

Question 1

Allophone

Answer 1

• ## A conditioned variant of a phoneme (i.e. the particular pronounciation of a given sound that occurs in a specific sound context or in a predictable environment).

Question 2

In English the pronounciation of certain sounds often depends on…

Answer 2

1. whether those sounds occur in a stressed or unsetressed syllable
2. their position in the syllable (onset/coda)

Question 3

Obligatory process

Answer 3

All native speakers of a particular dialect apply the allophonic process when the appropriate conditions are met

Question 4

Optional process

Answer 4

Native speakers MAY or MAY NOT apply the process, depending mainly on register and speech rate

Question 5

Phonemic diphthongs

Answer 5

• English has 3 phonemic diphthongs /ai, au, oi/ that is a diphthongs that funstion as single phonemes, and which can create meaning distinctions
• boy vs buy

Question 6

Phonetic diphthongs

Answer 6

• Phonetic diphthongs occur as preictable variants
• Lengthening leads to phonetic diphthongization of the TENSE vowels /i/, /e/, /u/, and /o/ when these phonemes occur in a syllable that receives primary stress

Question 7

What are the phonetic diphthongs and what are they?

Answer 7

/i/ = [ii] 
/e/ = [ei] 
/u/ = [uu]
/o/ = [ou]
- Allophonic/phonetic becasue they do not chan ge the meaning of the word, but it is an obligatory process by the Native speaker of the language.

Question 8

Canadian Raising

Answer 8

In Canadian English, but not American English, /ai/ and /au/ are realized as /ʌi/ and /ʌu/ before VOICELESS consonants
E.g. loud vs. lout / knives vs. knife

Question 9

Vowel Reduction

Answer 9

• Vowels in tertiary (a.k.a. unstressed) syllables are usually (though not always) reduced to schwa
• Sometimes vowel reduction is obligatorry or optional (depends on people!)

Question 10

Transcribing reduced vowels

Answer 10

• We do not reduce final unstressed /i/, most often represented orthographically as (happy, crazy)
• In careful, more formal speech, we often do not reduce the vowel in word-initial prefixes (e.g. re-,de-) or the first vowel of vowel-initial words.