Phonology I

Phonemes and Simple Rules

Connecting with last week

• Remember last week: the physics of speech. And, the idea that the consonant and vowel sounds we make have properties that can be described in terms of places, manners, etc.

• A striking fact: There’s a sense in which all of us are producing physically different sounds (and hearing, then, an infinite number of different“speech events”). Yet no matter who says “cat”, I recognize this as the word cat in English. How can that be?

• Answer: Speech sounds are categorized by in terms of features; these features are the basic objects of phonology.

Example

• Take, from the last slide, my example of cat, I.e., /kæt/.

• Taking just the first segment here, the consonant that we write as k in the IPA

• This is what we call a voiceless velar obstruent

• In the phonology, we posit that /k/ is a complex of features; though different features are sometimes found, something like this:

k = [+cons, +back, +obst, -voc]

(cons = consonant; back is a place feature; obst = obstruent, voc = voice)

• Notice, then, that /k/ differs from /g/ in terms of the voc feature: /k/ is [-voc], /g/ is [+voc]

• A large part of the sounds system of language operates in terms of these features

Features

• Remember that when we look at the physics of speech, we can make very fine-grained distinctions

• Categorizing speech sounds in terms of features is a way of eliminating that detail, in a way.

• So, for example, as far as phonology there is not an infinite set of degrees between voicelessness and being voiced

• A sound either counts as voiced, or not; I.e., [±voc]

Example, cont.

• Let’s take an example from English nouns. We write plurals with -s most of the time. Notice, though, that the plural morpheme has different pronunciations on different nouns:– Dogs

– Cats

– Zebras

– Churches

– Lemons

– Etc..

• If you listen carefully, you’ll find that it’s sometimes /s/, sometimes /z/, and sometimes /@z/ (that’s a schwa)

• Why is that?

The plural example

• Think of different ways the change in the plural morpheme’s sound form can be accounted for

– In the worst case scenario, speakers would just have to memorize which sound to use with which noun. Sometimes there’s a lot of memorization like this in language, but this isn’t one of those cases

– Instead, the form of the plural is correlated with the final sound of the noun:

• /-s/: cat, clock, heap, oaf

• /-z/: reed, log, flub, drive

• /-@z/: (think about this one….)– Try it with new nouns; Bach, glog

– Focus on the /s/ versus /z/ plurals. We don’t want to just list the consonants they come after; e.g. we don’t want to say “plural is pronounced /s/ after /t/, /k/, /p/, /f/”

Why not?• We don’t want to say that because a list of consonants

like that is in some sense arbitrary: it’s just a list. Phonology doesn’t work in terms of arbitrary lists!

• But something systematic connects all the consonants on the /s/ list, and all those on the /z/ list; it’s the feature [±voc].

• So what we want to say is this:– The /-s/ form of plural is found after C[-voc]– The /-z/ form of plural is found after C[+voc]

• In other words: The generalization about this part of English is stated in a way that makes reference to distinctive features.

• Probably here we want to say that plural is “basically” /-z/, and that it gets devoiced next to voiceless consonants. We’ll talk about rules like this later.

Phonemes

• Features are combined into larger units to make up what we think of as speech sounds. Among those sounds, some are special.

• The individual, distinctive sounds of a language are called phonemes

• We saw the different consonants and vowels that are part of English in the last lecture

• As we discussed before, this inventory will differ to some extent by the variety of English under consideration

• What we’re more concerned with here is this-- why is it that we say we have e.g. both [t] and [th] sounds in English, but only one phoneme /t/?

The basic insight

• We saw that in some contexts, the sound we write with t is realized as [t], and in others, as [th] (remember this works for other voiceless stops as well):– till vs. still, [t] vs. [th]

• As far as the sound system of English goes, though, the difference between unaspirated and aspirated t’s doesn’t do any real work in distinguishing words or morphemes from each other

• Another way of putting this is that the difference between[t] vs. [th] is not distinctive.

Being Distinctive

• We refer to the phonemes like /t/, /d/, etc. that are part of English phonology as distinctive because they make contrasts between different words

• This can be illustrated for stops by using minimal pairs: a pair of words that differ in only one phoneme: pill bill [p] vs. [b]

till dill [t] vs. [d]

kill gill [k] vs. [g]

These pairs show that voicing is distinctive for these stops

• The kind of analysis can be applied to vowels as well.

• We write the phonemes in /…./ as an indication that these are distinctive in the phonology of the language

Differences that are not distinctive

• We started, though, by noting that some aspects of pronunciation are not distinctive.– Remember: aspiration (using /p/ now)

pit vs. spit– The former [p] is aspirated, but the [p] in the latter is not– But: the distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated [p]

is not distinctive in English (although it is in other languages). That is, in English there are no pairs like

[pIt] ‘hole in the ground, etc.’

[phIt] (whatever this might be)– We see from this example that aspiration is not distinctive in

English (technically we would have to do more test that go beyond /p/, but you get the point)

Phonemes and Allophones

• Sometimes the same phoneme is pronounced in different ways depending on its context

• The variants of a phoneme are called allophones of that phoneme

• When we are talking about such distinctions, the phoneme is in slashes /…/ and the allophones are in square brackets […]

• The aspiration of e.g. /p/ is a case of this type; we say that /p/ in English has the allophones [p] and [ph]

Transcribing differences

• When we transcribe speech sounds using our IPA notation, we may do so in different ways.– If we are interested in every phonetic detail, we

would indicate effects like aspiration in English, even if it is not distinctive

– If we are interested more in the phonological inventory, we would omit the aspiration, as it is not distinctive

• For our purposes we will be concentrating mostly on the latter type

• When we focus on phonology, an abstract representation, we use slashes, e.g. /p/

Phonemes and Allophones, cont.

• So, to continue with our example, the phoneme /p/ appears in each of the following words:

pit

spit• Remember that we are interested in generalizations

about sound structure. In particular, the rule for aspiration in English is like this:1. English voiceless stops are

a. Aspirated if word initial, or syllable-initial preceding a stressed vowel:

Compare récord vs. recórd

b. Otherwise unaspirated.

Phonemes and their distributions

• Above we saw some simple minimal pairs of words that illustrate how we determine what the phonemes of a language are

• Other cases of distinctive features lead to some interesting observations

• Consider the nasals:– rum run rung

• These phonemes can all appear at the end of the word; but, [ng], unlike the other two, has the property that it never occurs word-initially in English– map nap *ngap

• Although it occurs only at the end of the word, it’s still a phoneme, as seen in run vs rung, or sin vs. sing, etc.

Applying some thinking

• One way of seeing whether or not we are dealing with two different phonemes or two allophones of the same phoneme involves what is called complementary distribution.

• We have already seen some things about distribution before– For example, /ng/ does not occur in word-internal position

• Think now about our minimal pairs like pill and bill. In these words, the p and b sounds occur in the same distributional position (word-initially)

• Another way of putting this is that the p sound and the b sound have a shared distribution; that is, they are not in complementary distribution, where one is found where the other is not

Distribution…

• Consider /f/ and /v/ in this light. In Modern English it is easy to find minimal pairs:– fat vs. vat

– safer vs. saver

• I.e., these sounds are not in complementary distribution. They are two phonemes.

• In Old English, though, this was not the case:– hlaford [v] ‘lord’

– æfter [f] ‘after’

– heofon [v] ‘heaven’

– fisc [f] ‘fish’

– ofer [v] ‘over’

– healf [f] ‘half’

Cross-Linguistic Differences

• Some sound differences are systematic in a lanuage, but are not phonemic. In another language, though, that sound difference might be phonemic….

• Everyone has encountered a language that contains a speech sound that is not in their native language

• As a general point, languages differ greatly both in terms of how many phonemes they have and in terms of which phonemes they have– Number of phonemes:

• Many: Some Khoisan languages, around 140 phonemes

• Few: E.g. Hawaiian, 13 phonemes

Other languages

• Like it says above, languages have different numbers of phonemes

• In some cases, a contrast that is not phonemic in one language is phonemic in another

• E.g. Hindi has contrastive voiced/voiceless like English, but aspiration is also contrastive:

bal ‘hair’ dal ‘lentil’ gal ‘cheek’

pal ‘take care of’ tal ‘beat’ kal ‘era’

phal ‘knife blade’ thal ‘plate’ khal ‘skin’

Listen to these (and more…) at:

http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter12/hindi.html