3 - Allophonic relations

Summary

KEY TERMS

1. allophone

2. phoneme

3. complementary distribution

4. contrast

5. distinctiveness

PREVIEW

This chapter begins the analysis of phonological processes. You will:

• learn of predictable variants of basic sounds in English

• learn about the concepts “phoneme” and “allophone”

• discover that similar relations between sounds exist in other languages

• begin to learn the general technique for inducing phonological rules from data that come from a language which you do not know

• be introduced to the formalization of phonological rules

While a phonetically accurate representation of pronunciation is useful to phonology, the focus of phonology is not transcription of words, but is rather the mental rules which govern the pronunciation of words in a given language. Certain facts about pronunciation simply cannot be predicted by rule, for example that in English the word sick is pronounced [sιk] and sip is pronounced [sιp]. Hence one fundamental component of a language is a lexicon, a list of words (or morphemes – parts of words), which must provide any information which cannot be predicted by rules of the language. However, much about the pronunciation of words can be predicted. For example, in the word tick the initial voiceless consonant t is phonetically aspirated, and is phonetically transcribed [t^hιk]. This aspiration can be demonstrated visually by dangling a tissue in front of the mouth when saying the word: notice that when you pronounce t, the tissue is blown forward.