Phonemes

COG.SCI 050.240
WORLD OF LANGUAGE
LEGENDRE
SOUND PATTERNING: COMMON PROCESSES; PHONEMES VS. ALLOPHONES
1. Narrow vs. broad phonetic transcription
Compare the first stop in:
tone [ ] vs. stone [ ]
pat [ ] vs. spat [ ]
kit [ ] vs. skit [ ]
generalization:
Narrow phonetic transcriptions are detailed; they often involve diacritics reflecting coarticulation and
position effects; sounds are typically not produced in isolation, but in combination with other sounds.
Aspiration in English is not motivated by coarticulation! It may enhance perception of voiceless consonants.
2. Most common articulatory processes affecting segments
A lot of actual phonetic variation is due to the fact that articulating words involves planning a complex series of
muscular movements. This causes assimilation of individual segments to their immediate environment.
Nasalization: a vowel becomes nasalized before a nasal consonant
kiss [ ] kin [ ] kim [ ] king [ ]
dad [ ] dan [ ] dam [ ] dang [ ]
Palatalization: a voiceless stop becomes a voiceless affricate (stop + fricative at the same point of
articulation) before a palatal glide [j] in informal speech
got you! [ ] => [ ]
Palatalization is extremely frequent cross-linguistically before high front unrounded vowels
Devoicing: English /l/ blue [ ] plow [ ]
gleam clap
log play
leaf clear
Voicing, incl. intervocalic voicing (all vowels are voiced!) in some Italian dialects
‘house’ ‘thing’ ‘dishonest’ ‘bus’
Tuscan (Florence) ca[s]a co[s]a di[s]onesto bu[s]ino
Lombardian (Milan) ca[z]a co[z]a di[z]onesto bu[z]ino
An articulatory process frequently encountered in loanwords is
Epenthesis: a vowel can be inserted to break a consonantal cluster in borrowings from another language
Japanese loanwords: silk [ ]
Christmas [ ]
French shows extensive consonant deletion e.g. in feminine-masculine pairs of adjectives. When the same
adjective appears just before a noun beginning in a vowel, that consonant is pronounced.
petite [ ] ‘small-fem’ petit [ ] ‘small-masc’ petit enfant [ ] ‘small child-masc’
grosse [ ] ‘big-fem’ gros [ ] ‘big-masc’ gros appétit [ ] ‘big appetite-masc’

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See textbook, Ch. 2 for additional articulatory processes: dissimilation, vowel reduction, and metathesis.
ð Crucial observation: all these processes are systematic in a language: They apply to classes of sounds.
3. Suprasegmental properties
are typically independent of particular segments in a language.
Length (of segment): IPA symbol ‘:’ (= colon)
short vs. long vowels in German:
Stadt [ ] ‘city’ Staat [ ] ‘state, e.g. of Maryland’
wenn [ ] ‘whom’ wen [ ] ‘when’
bitten [ ] ‘to request’ bieten [ ] ‘to wish’
short vs. long consonants in Italian:
fato [ ] ‘fate’ fatto [ ] ‘fact’
vano [ ] ‘vain’ vanno [ ] ‘they go’
beve [ ] ‘he drinks’ bevve [ ] ‘he drank’
H
Tone: differences in pitch Chinese high tone [ma] ‘mother’ (register tone)
MLH
fall rise [ma] ‘horse’ (contour tone)
MH
mid rise [ma] ‘hemp’ (contour tone)
HL
high fall [ma] ‘scold’ (contour tone)
Notation: H (high), M (mid), L (low) on line above with association line.
Stress: relative prominence of syllables
Notation: acute accent on vowel nucleus for primary stress, e.g. [é]
grave accent for secondary stress, e.g. [è]
English desert [ ] dessert [ ]
(a) record [ ] to record [ ]
4. Not all sounds are equal in a language!
Within a language some sounds have a privileged status in that they carry the burden of encoding differences in
meaning. They are called phonemes. Others (called allophones) are phonetically close variants of existing
phonemes; their typically single distinct phonetic property is predictable from their phonetic environment.
Phonemes are contrastive sounds (represented as / /).
Test: contrastive or minimal pairs (see also near-minimal pairs)
pat, bat fat, vat sit, zit sit, sat
Are the following minimal pairs?
boat, bought sheep, Jeep
loose, lost now, no

Non-contrastive, predictable sounds are called allophones (represented as [ ])
Test: complementary distribution
tone [ ] stone [ ] pot [ ] or [ ]
pit [ ] spit [ ] tip [ ] or [ ]
kin [ ] skin [ ] nik [ ] or [ ]
Main phonetic environments: word-initial, word-final position; between vowels; after/before a specific sound.
When a given word can have more than one pronunciation in the same phonetic environment, allophones are said
to be in free variation: e.g. stop [stɑp] or [stɑp˥] ˥ = unreleased stop (IPA diacritic)
5. Procedure for determining phonemes in any language
a) List the phonetic environments in which the sounds in question appear
b) Do the sounds occur in the same environment?
- No, the sounds are in complementary distribution => they are allophones of the same phoneme
- Yes, the sounds are in overlapping distribution
=>They are allophones in free variation if the words have the same meaning OR
=>They are allophones of different phonemes if the words form minimal pairs
Pairing sounds with phonetic environments:
[ ] [ ] [ ] in word-initial position
[ ] [ ] [ ] immediately following [s]
[ ] [ ] [ ] in word-final position
[ ] [ ] [ ] in word-final position
How many variants of [t], [p], [k] are there (in this example)? __________________________________
What is the generalization governing their distribution? _______________________________________
Important: Allophonic variation involves pairs of speech sounds that are very similar in all features (e.g.
manner, place of articulation, etc.) except for one (e.g. voicing, aspiration, etc.; see 6. below)
Which allophone is identified as the phoneme (the underlying form from which all allophones are derived)?
It is usually the allophone with the widest distribution (it is known as the elsewhere variant because it subsumes
several distinct phonetic environments).
e.g. English / / / / / /
[ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
elsewhere elsewhere elsewhere
6. For a given sound, its status (phoneme vs. allophone of an existing phoneme) varies in different languages
Khmer [pɔ:ŋ] 'to wish' [p h ɔ:ŋ] 'also'
[tɔp] 'to support' [t h ɔp] 'be suffocated'
[kat] 'to cut' [k h at] 'to polish'
French [vĩ] ‘wine’ [põ] ‘bridge’ [sã] ‘blood’
[vi] ‘life’ [po] ‘jar’ [sa] ‘his,her’
Note: Nasalized vowels are not the same thing as nasal vowels; their status is different!
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Tagalog [datiŋ] 'to arrive' [daraʔiŋ] 'will complain'
[dami] 'amount' [marumi] 'dirty'
[dumi] 'dirt' [marami] 'many'
[daratiŋ] 'will arrive' [daʔiŋ] 'to complain'
[mandurukot] ‘pickpocket’ [mandukot] 'to go pickpocketing'
7. Phonetic vs. phonemic inventories
For a given language it is necessary to establish both a phonetic inventory and a phonemic inventory.
The phonemic inventory of a language is always a subset of a phonetic inventory. It is obtained by analysis, not
direct elicitation.
8. Production vs. perception of speech
Speakers pronounce allophones.
Hearers have a hard time perceiving phonetic differences that are not contrastive because they are typically
focused on interpreting what they hear.
9. Alphabetic spelling systems generally ignore phonetic variation that is not contrastive. They typically encode
phonemes only.
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