LING 111-Phonology I (Jan 30)

Production and perception of speech sounds...articulatory features of sounds..acoustic properties of sounds...human physiology

How sounds are organized in the mind...what are the regularities determining how sounds are allowed o combine to form morphemes?...How are they not allowed to combine?...Some of it has to do with physiology, but for the most part phonology does not depend on physiology...The restrictions imposed on sound combinations are mental rather than physiological

the study of the rules that dictate the mapping between the mental representation and the acoustic reality

In linguistics we don't really study languages, we study the properties of the human mind through language

The phonological module of our mental grammar maps the acoustic stimulus onto mental representations...but many different acoustic signals get mapped onto the same mental represtnation. We therefore experience as the same sounds that are actually very different from each other

The actual acoustic realization of a phoneme

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Word x and y form a minimal pair if and only if

i: x and y differ in meaning
ii: x and y are identical in all but one sound

The two sounds in terms of which x and y differ, are allophones of different phonemes

Minimal pairs

you have to figure out what determines the distribution of the allophones

[sound 1] and [sound 2] are in complimentary distribution if and only if the phonological contexts in which sound 1 appears do not overlap with the phonological contexts in which sound 2 appears