LESSON 3-1
Phonological Units &
Distribution
In Lesson 2, you learned
about Phonetics, which deals with the physical, articulatory
(physiological) and auditory properties of speech sounds. We focused on the articulatory
characteristics for the most part, dabbling in the physical aspects in our
discussion of suprasegmentals.
Phonetics, in a nutshell, studies sounds as physical entities. In contrast, Phonology studies the
sound patterns found in human language; it seeks to determine how “languages
organize their sound inventories.” (File 4.1, p. 69) Your textbook talks about how alveolar and
palatal voiceless fricatives follow different patterns in Japanese an
English. Both languages have these
speech sounds; however, only in English the two sounds serve to
distinguish meanings. In English, we
cannot simply substitute one for the other without changing the meaning. Consider, for example, the words same
and shame, which are identical except for the initial consonant.
Let us look at a second
example, aspiration in English, to really drive this point home. As we noted in Lesson 2, in English
voiceless stops are aspirated (followed by a puff of air) when they occur at
the beginning of a word before a stressed vowel; otherwise, they are unaspirated. For example, [p] in pin is aspirated
and in spin it is not aspirated.
If you didn’t aspirate it in pin, it would sound a bit
strange/unusual, but people would still understand you and what you are
referring to. The meaning of the word
doesn’t change solely based on aspiration.
That is, aspiration is not contrastive in English. Given that,
we’ll categorize the aspirated p and unaspirated p as variations
of the same sound unit, and will call them allophones. The ‘allo’ part simply means variation and phone
means a phonetic unit. We’ll use
(actually continue to use) square brackets while listing/transcribing
allophones, e.g., [p] for unaspirated p.
Now consider the
pronunciation and meanings of the following words: pin and bin.
The former starts with a voiceless bilabial stop, and the latter with a
voiced bilabial stop. And if you
substituted one sound for the other, you’d change the meaning. In other words,
the two sounds p and b are able to distinguish or contrast
words. They are contrastive/distinctive
sounds in English. Such distinctive
sounds are called phonemes.
We’ll use slashes to enclose phonemes or phonemic representations,
e.g., /p/ /b/. While trying to determine if two sounds are
distinct phonemes, we make use of minimal pairs. A minimal pair is a pair of words with
different meanings “which are
pronounced exactly the same way except for one sound that differs.” (File
4.1. p. 73) Thus, we have a minimal
pair in pin and bin.
Another minimal pair, this time contrasting /t/ and /d/ would be till
and dill. Yet another one would
be fine and vine.
Let us have a mini, informal
exercise here (no need to go to Caucus).
Consider the pronunciation of the following words: chin and gin
and answer the questions that follow.
1. Is this a minimal pair? (yes; exactly same
except for initial consonant & we have different meanings)
2. If yes, what does it indicate? (that the voiceless
and voiced affricates are separate phonemes.)
3. Is voicing contrastive in English? Why? (yes; it distinguishes one phoneme from
another)
The term distribution
is significant in phonology. It refers to the phonetic environments in which a
given sound (phone) occurs. Phonemes,
not surprisingly, are said to be in contrastive distribution: interchanging
them, as we saw above, could change the meanings of words. Allophones, on the other hand, are said to
be in complementary distribution: their distributions complement
each other to form a whole. Let us
consider the aspiration of stops in English once more. As you know by now, aspiration is not
contrastive/distinctive in English; we can predict where it will occur, i.e.,
when the stop is in word initial position before a stressed vowel. It is unaspirated when it occurs after an
[s]. Thus, when we add the phonetic
environments where the aspirated p and its unaspirated counterpart
occur, we get the whole distribution for the entire phoneme /p/. Free variation is the third type of
distribution that we’ll cover briefly here.
Free variation is defined as “in some phonetic contexts more than one
pronunciation of a given sound may be possible” (4.1, p. 74) --and the
meaning of the affected word remains constant.
That is, free variation is non-contrastive distribution. For example, in word-final position (as in leap)
some people completely release their [p] s and some do not. It is still the same phoneme /p/.
As noted in the first
paragraph above, distribution of sounds differs across languages. That is, two given phones can be in
complementary (non-contrastive) distribution in one language, and in
contrastive distribution in another.
This is a very important point to note for ESL instructors; at
least some of the pronunciation problems you’ll encounter can be attributed to
differences in sound distribution. Some
examples of how languages differ in terms of sound distribution follow:
You are now ready to work on
Exercise 3 and post your answers online.
Go to page 75 in your textbook, and study the Ukrainian data carefully;
then answer questions a-e. While giving
your answers, use the English glosses (translations). That way, you wouldn’t have to deal with phonetic symbols online. For example, ‘fox’ and ‘sheen’ constitute a
minimal pair in Ukrainian – part of answer to a). Note: Groups have changed; please see below.
Group 1:Erin Scott, Susan
Marier, Robert Burton, Kara Johnson, Carmen Narciso, and Liz Hagen
Group 2: Karl Schoeller,
Daniel Kilibarda, Jonathon Benbow, Michelle Nellis, Abby Bateman, and Heather
Bae
Group 3: Cindy Scudiero, Mary
Kay Kanninen, Amy Filo, Karen Johnson, Valissa Maas, and Fodda Haj
Group 4: Tom Byrne, Pamela
McInnes, Rachel Funk, Daniel Nelson, Susan Ryan, and Sheryl Anderson
Group 5: Cynthia Peterson, Anne
Josephson, Anne Lushine, Beth Kohls, Tracey Valbuena, and Jill Javor
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Now we are ready for our
discussion of Phonological Processes.