Week 5 - Phonemic Analyses

Question 1

What is Phonemic Analysis used for?

Answer 1

uses methods which establish whether phones are in contrast in a specific language

- examine words to identify distribution
- identify phonetic context

Question 2

PHONEMIC ANALYSIS METHOD

Answer 2

1. MINIMAL PAIRS: Evidence of Contrast
2. FREE VARIATION
   Evidence of Non-Contrast
3. COMPLEMENTARY DISTRIBUTION
   &raquo_space; 4. Check for Phonetic Similarity

Question 3

COMPLEMENTARY DISTRIBUTION (explained again)

Answer 3

• two phones never occur in same phonetic contexts in words, logically, they cant be the ONLY difference between words.

EG:
1. phone X occurs at beginning of words only: XAB
2. phone Y occurs only at end: DEY
3. then X vs Y can never be only difference between words:
> cant be a word *YAB vs XAB, or *DEX vs DEY

means the difference aint used to ENCODE MEANING at word-level
= they NOT CONTRASTIVE

Question 4

Finding complementary distribution

Answer 4

Look for /mutually exclusive/ distributions
> according to diff kinds of phonetic context

PHONETIC CONTEXT in terms of:
1. POSITION
     - start/middle/end of word
     - position in syllable
2. SEGMENTAL CONTEXT
    >immediately preceeding
    > immediately following
    > both taken together
    > Non-adjoining segments
3. COMBO POS/SEG

REMEMBER phones can have overlapping distributions IN SOME TERMS
eg in terms of position, but NOT segment,
so, they can still be in Mutually Exclusive/In comp dist., even if in ONE context, they OVERLAP

Question 5

Formal Phonemic rules

Answer 5

Arrow-slash-dash rule format

→ means ‘has the allophone(s)’ (aka ‘is realised as’)

{ } means disjunctive set eg {a or b or c}

/ means ‘in the environment/context of’

_ indicates the position of the allophone relative to the conditioning environment

rule notation can be simpificd by abbreviating MOST DIVERSE DIST. as “elsewhere”

Question 6

Labelling the phone

Answer 6

The best choice to represent a phoneme is the allophone with the least restricted distribution = most diverse distribution

English nasals

• [n̪] only found before dentals [ð] [θ] in English
• [n] occurs before the range of other consonants, and vowels
• /n/ = best candidate for phoneme /n/