Week 4 Flashcards
Every language has words/morphemes. What characteristics does a word have?
Every word has a form, meaning and a syntactic category.
Form:
Sequence of gestures (sign language)
Sequence of sounds (spoken language)
Meaning:
A lexical word is ‘a single unit of language that has meaning and can be spoken, written or signed’.
Category: noun
How can words be further divided?
They can be divided into syllables.
A structure is added: one syllable with onset /w/, nucleus /ɜ:/, offset /d/
The rhyme consists of…
Nucleus and offset
What is evidence for the syllable?
-
Speech production errors (‘spoonerisms’):
A malt whisky -> a whalt misky. - Many languages use one symbol for a syllable in the orthography (Japanese Hiragana).
- The syllable is intuitively a clear concept (native speakers have strong intuitions about the syllabification of words in their native language).
Syllable
An abstract unit that exists at some higher level in the mental activity of the speaker.
What is recognisable about syllable structure?
Every syllable has a ‘centre part’ or nucleus (N).
Usually, the nucleus position is occupied by [-consonant] segments, i.e. vowels (V).
In which languages can the nucleus be filled by a sonorant consonant (syllabic consonants)?
And what is the most sonorous part of the syllable?
English and German
The nucleus is the most sonorous part of the syllable.
Syllabic consonants
Sonorant consonants (m, n, or l)
How many timing positions does the nucleus have and how are these timing positions represented?
The nucleus can have one timing position (for short vowels and syllabic consonants) or two (for diphthongs and long vowels).
Timing positions are represented on the ‘skeletal tier’.
Which segments of a syllable are always unstressed? What is the diacritic?
Schwa (always unstressed in RP and SSBE).
Syllabic consonants: m, n, or l (always unstressed)
bottom /’bɒ.tᵊm/ [‘bɒ.tˌm]
button [‘bʌ.tˌn]
bottle [‘bɒ.tˌn] noun
What does a non-branching nucleus look like?
It can consist of a short vowel (lax vowel) or syllabic sonorant consonant (mˌnˌlˌ).
Which words cannot end in a short vowel (/sɪ/) or a syllabic sonorant consonant (/tm/)?
Monosyllabic lexical words
How can monosyllabic lexical words not end? And how can they end?
They cannot end in a short vowel or a syllabic sonorant consonant.
Monosyllabic lexical words can end in a long vowel or diphthong.
[+long] = /bi:/ ‘bee’, /ka:/ ‘car’
[-long] = */bɪ/, */kæ/
What does a branching nucleus consist of?
A diphthong or a long vowel.
How does the nucleus branch in stressed open syllables?
The nucleus ‘branches’ and contains a diphthong or a long vowel that is not followed by a consonant.
/haʊ/
/si:/
Open syllables and closed syllables
Open syllables end in a vowel (you, see).
In closed syllables, the nucleus is followed by a consonant. The consonant is not part of the nucleus. It is in ‘coda position’ (out, eat).
How do you form the rhyme?
Nucleus + coda (goose, seat)
N + C = R
Internal syllable structure and their functions
- Onset (plays a crucial role in phonotactic restrictions).
- Nucleus (only obligatory part of the syllable).
- Rhyme (plays a role in stress assignment).
What is remarkable about CV syllables?
Every language of the world has CV syllable, i.e. syllables of the shape ‘onset + nucleus’.
Setting up syllables
- Nucleus-formation: in English, vowels and sonorant consonants are relinked to the nucleus.
- Onset-formation: onsets are maximised, so consonants to the left are adjoined one by one as long as the configuration resulting at each step satisfies all relevant phonotactic rules of the language in question.
- Coda-formation: all remaining consonants to the right of a vowel are linked to the ‘coda’ (obeying phonotactic rules).
- Together, the nucleus and coda form the ‘rhyme’ of a syllable.
What are the steps to setting up a syllable in English?
Nucleus, onset, coda = syllable
Empty onset
It still branches out and says ‘empty onset’ in, for example, the word ‘elephant’, which starts with a nucleus.
Onset consonant clusters
un.true
in.famous
ad.venture
English allows adjacent consonants in the onset of a syllable.
Universally ‘marked’; has to be learnt by the language learning infant (Joan 1;10 black -> [bak].
Also, there is phonotactic constraint: adjacent consonants in the onset must differ by a certain degree of sonority (see (10) in section 7.2).
Sonority
Unconstricted vocal tract, high in acoustic energy, acoustically periodic.
- Vowels
- Glides
- Liquids /l r/ sounds
- Nasal stops
- Fricatives
- Oral stops
Constricted vocal tract, low in acoustic energy, acoustic aperiodic.
More detailed scale:
1. Low vowels
2. High vowels
3. Approximants
4. Nasals
5. Voiced fricatives
6. Voiceless fricatives
7. Voiced stops
8. Voiceless tops
Sonority in onset clusters (sonority rises =…)
Sonority rises = obstruent +liquid
Minimal sonority distance = (*obstruent + nasal)
This course is about…
- The language users’ subconscious knowledge of speech sounds.
- Which speech sounds are used in a language to contrast meaning (phonemes).
- How phonemes may alter their form depending on the context (allophones).
- How phonemes may combine with each other in syllables.
Phonotactic restrictions in onsets (what do word-initial consonant clusters usually begin with in English?)
In English, word-initial consonant clusters usually begin with /p t k b d g f s/ followed by liquids /j/ or /w/ (nasal crossed out): plan, twelve, cute, dream, flew.
Segment 1: [+cons, -son]
Segment 2: [+cons, +son, -nasal]
Loanwords and /kn/-cluster
Words from another language are incorporated into another language.
There is no word-initial /kn/-cluster in the phonology of English: knee [ni].
Loanwords with initial /kn/: English speaking adults perceive both sounds, but their grammar does not allow them to realise a /kn/-sequence as such.
- Knesset -> inserts a /ə/ in the cluster = epenthesis.
Light and heavy syllables
In light syllables, the nucleus and rhyme does not branch.
In heavy syllables, the rhyme and/or nucleus branches.
Onset
All consonants occurring before the vowel.
What is a word in English that only has a nucleus in the syllable?
Eye
Monosyllabic
Morphemes like bile, which contain only one syllable are monosyllabic.
Polysyllabic
Morphemes may contain more than one syllable, like rider, desire, elephant.
Which languages must contain an onset consonant in the syllable?
In some languages, all syllables must contain an onset consonant but in English this is not the case (empty onset in ‘it’).
Branching onsets
Onsets have two segments (bring, trap, clip).
Branching coda
The coda contains has more than one segment (hunt).
Complex segments
/tʃ/ and /dʒ/ behave like single segments while having an internal structure which resembles two segments.
Why can we unconsciously judge that /tlɪnk/ is ill-formed?
There are universal and language-specific constraints on the form that syllables may take -> sonority scale, maximal onset principle.
What suggests that coda positions are the most basic?
- Children first develop ‘canonical babbling’.
- In cases of aphasia (damage to speech), CV syllable structures are usually the first to reappear.
- Coda consonants are most likely to have loss of articulation.
Maximal Onset Principle
The consonants that form a word-internal onset are the maximal sequence that can be found at the beginning of words. English permits only 3 consonants to form an onset.
Once 2nd and 3rd consonants are determined, only one can appear in the first position.
