This document discusses phonological contrast and how it is determined. It explains that segments are in contrast if changing one segment changes the meaning of a word. Minimal pairs are used to establish contrast between sounds - if two sounds can make a minimal pair, they are considered distinct phonemes. Phonemes represent underlying forms stored in the lexicon, while allophones are surface variants determined by phonological rules. The document provides examples of contrastive and non-contrastive sounds across different languages to illustrate how contrast is language-specific.

1. PHONOLOGICAL CONTRAST
10/12/2010
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2. Recap
❖ Phonology: phonological rules and processes
❖ Phonological rule: a segment in the underlying form is
pronounced differently in a certain phonological environment
❖ Underlying form: the lexical entry — the stored pronunciation of
a word or sound
❖ Environment: where a segment occurs, defined by the segments
that neighbor it
❖ Some processes that change underlying forms are epenthesis,
deletion, metathesis, assimilation, dissimilation, and reduction.
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3. Vowel reduction
❖ English: unstressed vowels are often pronounced as schwa [ə]
★ Canada [kǽnədə]
★ Canadian [kənéjdiən]
❖ Stressed vs. unstressed the: [i] reduces to [ə]
★ the Queen of England (the one and only) [ðij kwijn]
★ the Queen of England [ðə kwijn]
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4. Rule writing
❖ When we’re confronted with data, we ask three questions:
★ Is there a pattern? Could the environment be playing a role?
★ What are the possible patterns?
★ What is the underlying form?
❖ First step: is there a pattern?
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5. IS THERE A PATTERN?
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6. Contrast
❖ Speakers know which segments of their language contrast and
which do not
❖ Segments are in contrast when their presence alone can change
the meaning of a word
also “distinctive”, “in opposition”
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7. Contrast
❖ Examples from English:
★ [s] and [z]: sip [sɪp] and zip [zɪp]
★ [ɪ] and [ɑ]: hit [hɪt] and hot [hɑt]
❖ In these words, when we change the sound, we change the
meaning
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8. Contrast
❖ When two segments contrast in an environment, there’s no rule
to predict when you get one versus the other
❖ What’s the environment that each sound occurs in?
★ [s] or [z]?
★ sip [sɪp] and zip [zɪp]
★ [ɪ] or [ɑ]?
★ hit [hɪt] and hot [hɑt]
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9. Minimal pairs
❖ First step: establish which sounds are in contrast with each other in the
language
★ Different for every language
❖ Minimal pair: two words with distinct meanings that differ only by
exactly one segment found in the same position in each word
★ [sɪp] and [zɪp]
★ [hɪt] and [hɑt]
★ [lus] and [luz]
★ [fəsi] and [fəzi]
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10. Minimal pairs
❖ Minimal pairs based on sound and not spelling
❖ Minimal pair test:
★ Find a minimal pair for two sounds e.g. [p] and [b]
★ If there is a minimal pair, the two sounds are contrastive in that
language
❖ Apply the minimal pair test for these pairs of sounds:
★ [p] and [b]
★ [i] and [ɪ]
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11. Minimal pairs
❖ Near-minimal pair: two words with distinct meanings that
contrast segments in nearly identical environments.
★ Some languages don’t have minimal pairs for every pair of
sounds, but the sounds may still be contrastive
★ In this case, use near-minimal pairs:
★ assure [əʃʊ́ɹ] vs. azure [ǽʒɹ̩]
★ author [ɔ́θɹ̩] vs. either [íjðɹ̩]
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12. Phonemes
❖ Not every segment we produce is stored in our heads
★ Since rules can predict when we get certain segments, we
don’t need to store them all
★ For example, aspiration on stops in English is predictable, so
we don’t need to store whether a stop is aspirated or not in our
lexicon
★ The rule does all the work
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13. Phonemes
❖ Phonemes: distinctive sounds in a language that contrast with
other sounds in that language
❖ Phonemes are the set of sounds you store in your lexicon
❖ If two sounds are contrastive (i.e. pass the minimal pair test), they
belong to separate phonemes of that language
❖ Since we can’t write a rule to describe the distribution of the two
contrastive sounds, we say they’re both stored in the lexicon
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14. Announcements
❖ HW posted Friday
★ Three phonology problems
❖ Assignment  will be returned Monday
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15. Phonemes
❖ Native speakers perceive phonemes as different and distinct
sounds
★ Knowledge of phonology of your language = knowledge of
which sounds can change the meaning of a word
❖ Phones (=sounds) come out of your mouth, but phonemes are in
your head
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16. Allophones
❖ Allophones are different pronunciations of a phoneme
❖ Two sounds are allophones of the same phoneme if they have the
same underlying form
★ e.g., aspirated and un-aspirated [t] in English are allophones of
the same phoneme
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17. Transcription
❖ When we transcribed phones in phonetics we used square brackets
[ ]:
★ [sɪp]
★ Allophones
❖ When we transcribe phonemes, we use / /:
★ /sɪp/
❖ We use the two types of brackets to distinguish between underlying
form (phonemes) and actual pronunciation (allophones)
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18. Other contrastive segments
❖ Some segments don’t have minimal pairs
❖ May never occur in same environment:
★ English [h] and [ŋ]: [h] only occurs at the beginning of
words, [ŋ] at the end of syllables
❖ Rare segments: [ʒ] is very rare in English (occurs mostly in words
borrowed from French)
★ Leash [liʃ] and leige [liʒ]
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19. Other contrastive segments
❖ However, these sounds may still be contrastive
❖ The Minimal Pair Test tells us when two sounds are contrastive,
but does not tell us when two sounds are not contrastive
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20. Language-specific contrasts
❖ Whether or not two sounds are contrastive is language-specific
★ Two sounds can be phonetically distinct without being
phonologically contrastive
❖ If two sounds aren’t contrastive, they are in complementary
distribution
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21. Complementary Distribution
❖ When two sounds are in complementary distribution, they never
appear in the same environment
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22. Language-specific contrasts
❖ Example: English vs. Turkish [ɛ] and [æ]
English Turkish
[bɛn] ‘Ben’ [bɛn] ‘I’
[bæn] ‘ban’ [bæn] ‘I’
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23. Language-specific contrasts
❖ Long and short vowels don’t contrast in English, but do in
Japanese and Finnish
Japanese
[toɽi] ‘bird’ [toɽiː] ‘shrine gate’
[kibo] ‘scale’ [kiboː] ‘hope’
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24. Language-specific contrasts
Finnish
[tuli] ‘fire’ [tuːli] ‘wind’
[hætæ] ‘distress’ [hæːtæː] ‘to evict’
English
[hæt] ‘hat’ [hæːt] ‘hat’
[hit] ‘heat’ [hiːt] ‘heat’
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25. Non-contrastive sounds?
❖ First step: establish which sounds are contrastive (using Minimal
Pair Test)
❖ Next, we will discover how to deal with sounds that are not
contrastive in a language
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26. RULES
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10/13/2010

27. Levels of representation
❖ Two levels of representation
★ Phonemes = underlying form
★ Allophones = surface form
❖ Phonemes are the contrastive sounds of a language (in our
minds)
❖ Allophones are the predictable phonetic variants of the
phonemes (what we pronounce)
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28. Rules
❖ A rule has two parts:
★ A statement of the change (using an arrow)
★ A statement about the environment in which the change takes place
❖ General form:
★ Underlying form ➙ Surface form / environment
★ /X/ ➙ [Y] / A_B
★ The phoneme /X/ is pronounced as the allophone [Y] when it
occurs between an A and B
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29. Example
A B
blue [blu] plow [pl̥aw]
gleam [glim] clap [kl̥æp]
slip [slɪp] clear [kl̥iɹ]
flog [flɔg] play [pl̥ej]
leaf [lif]
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30. Example
❖ State the environment in terms of the natural class: [p k] = voiceless stops
❖ Example: /l/ rules in English:
★ /l/ ➙ [l̥] / after a word-initial voiceless stop
★ /l/ ➙ [l] / elsewhere
❖ We don’t need two rules for voiceless /l/:
★ /l/ ➙ [l̥] / after [p]-
★ /l/ ➙ [l̥] / after [k]
★ /l/ ➙ [l̥] / after voiceless stops
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