Ling 1 Week 4

How are vowels distinguished from each other?

1. height of tongue in mouth 2. front or backness of tongue in mouth 3. position of lips (rounded or nah)

How do we distinguish consonant pronunciations?

1. state of glottis 2. places of articulation 3. Manner of articulation

natural class

A group of vowels or consonants that have a feature in common

Articulators

Flexible organs which can be moved; these are the lips (labial sounds) and the tongue. (The PART of the tongue which is the main articulator can be named, e.g. coronal for the tongue blade, dorsal for the back of the tongue or tongue body)

Manner of articulation

Is the air stopped (stops), is there local friction (fricatives), both (affricates), weak friction (approximants, which include glides like w, j and liquids like l), does air go through the nose (nasal)?

state of glottis

Is the glottis vibrating (voiced) or not (voiceless)? (glottis is the part of larynx that has vocal chords and stilt like opening between them.)

minimal pair

Minimal pairs differ by exactly one sound in the same position in the word/morpheme - like ten and den. Since these two sounds occur in the same context (at the beginning of a word in front of -ɛn, the difference between them can't be the result of a rule.

Making a verb past tense, what is the first pronunciation rule?

Step 1: Regular Past Tense formation: Always insert -d (or rather: the feature bundle that corresponds to d) to form a regular past tense.

Clicks

Stop consonants (like [t] or [d]) produced with a backward gliding motion of the tongue body along the velum that makes them particularly loud; only found in the Khoisan and Bantu language families, in southern Africa.

Places or Points of articulation

The areas where the articulators create the most constriction; these may be the lips (labial sounds), the teeth (dental sounds), the alveolar ridge behind the teeth (alveolar sounds), the roof of the mouth or hard palate (palatal sounds), the velum or soft palate (velar sounds), or the vocal cords or glottis (glottal sounds).

Air passages

The mouth (oral sounds) or the nasal passage (nasal sounds)

Place of articulation

Where is the main air constriction in the vocal tract?

th and t are never found in the same context and aren't phonemes. They are said to be found in ____ and are thus ______.

complementary distribution; allophones of the same phoneme (one is produced by a rule of the other, meaning th is only produced in contexts t can't be, they are still part of the same overarching sound)

Ejectives

consonants produced without the lungs, which use the larynx as a pump, and have a distinct "popping" sound; found in languages all across the Americas, as well as Kartvelian languages in Georgia (in the Caucasus).

International Phonetic Alphabet

describes the sounds of all of the world's languages (Bell's alphabet)

allophones

different sounds

voiceless consonants

dont vibrate (p, f, t, s, k, sh (or ʃ as in shoe), as well as the last sound found in the German pronunciation of Bach (noted x) are all voiceless)

t/f: all sounds are phonemes

false th and t (t aspirates vs. t) are not, they are allophones. They are never found in the same context (th aspirated is only at beginnings whereas t is only in the word), and thus they can't be phonemes because phonemes are sounds that happen in the same context/spot

T/F: Roots and affixes are the smallest units of language

false, Roots and affixes are the smallest meaningful units of language

t/f: Alexander Melville Bell's invention was a convenient notational system for speech therapists and language freaks

false, it turned out to approximate quite closely the mental system that speakers use to encode the sounds of their language.

T/F: vowels and consonants are the smallest linguistic units there are in language

false, they are composed of articulatory features that are the smallest units

T/f: we normally find in English sequences of two consonants that are very similar

false, we don't like with *td, *dd, *kk, *kg, *gk, *gg, *pp, *pb. Thus it is natural to posit that vowel insertion is triggered to 'avoid' such sequences

What was Bells experiment?

he created an aplhabet of all spoken sounds, had a guy read words in different languages, and then used his kids to repeat the words back in a way that got the mispronunciations right on par

If after step 1 of adding a -d turns out to form a consonant sound that is too similar, watchu do?

insert a --schwarma-- between the two consonants pat Step 1: pat-d Step 2: pat-∂d Pad Step 1: pad-d Step 2: pad-∂d

would English be good in Bell's experiment?

no, some sounds are different with the same spelling and some unconscious pronunciation distinctions are automatic and not listed out (aspirating P in pam but not spam), some sounds are foreign to English but common in other languages (ll in Spanish)

phonemes

sounds occur in the same context that are not introduced by a phonological rule

we sometimes pronounce ed in walked as walkt with sound t, and some ed as d. whats the diff between t/d?

t is voiceless and d is voiced. they are both alveolar stops though. depends whats easier to flow in pronunciation of words, like saying walk-ed is hard

How do vowels differ from consonants?

the air stream flows freely for vowels. The differences between vowels are created by shaping the oral cavity to create different acoustic effects, similar to the way a harmonica player can shape the sound of the harmonica by opening or closing a hand around the instrument.

Phonetics

the branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, i.e. the physical properties of speech sounds (how they are physically produced, transmitted and perceived).

phonology

the branch of linguistics that is concerned with the regularities in how sounds pattern in a language and the source of these patterns. -The rules for past tense formation or plural formation we discussed are phonological rules.

b and p are both bilabial stop consonants, but how are they different then?

the main difference between b and p is that the former is voiced while the latter is voiceless. The same applies to the following pairs: v/f, d/t, z/s, g/k, sh/zh

If words are not memorized as whole units, what are they memorized as?

they're built out of roots and affixes

T/F: clicks can be produced by any articulator, and they maybe nasal or not, voiced or not

true

T/F: if roots and affixes are stored in memory as bundles of features, then roots and affixes are thus stored as series of instructions to the articulatory system (i.e. to the organs that allow us to produce speech)

true

T/F: roots and affixes are stored in memory not as strings of vowels and consonants but as bundles of features

true

t/f: with respect to a large class of consonants, English never has sequences of one voiced and one voiceless consonant.

true, his can be seen in the following examples, which involve words that end in -s/-z and -t/-d

T/F: Phonological rules target groups of sounds that have one or serveral features in common/natural classes

true, never targets arbitrary class of sounds

If after Step 2 the result is that -d follows a consonant which is voiceless, so that the resulting sequence would be hard to pronounce, watchu do?

turn d into its voiceless counterpart, t. (Thus in the end the two vowels will both be voiced or both be voiceless. For this reason Step 3 is called a rule of assimilation). Lick Step 1: lick-d Step 2: no change (because k and d are not very similar) Step 3: lick-t (because k is voiceless, hence d must be turned into its voiceless counterpart)

Tones Languages

use pitch to differentiation words.; Most languages in the world (such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai, Zulu, Navajo, Punjabi, Hausa, and thousands of others)

voiced consonants

vibrates (b, v, m, d, z, n, g, ng (or ŋ as in sing) are voiced, as well as the second consonant of measure)

how did Bell's kids know all the sounds?

what Bell had done was to devise a systematic alphabet to encode the articulatory gestures by which the sounds of the world's languages are produced. He listed the basic mechanisms of speech articulation including air passages, articulators, places of articulation

complementary distribution

when one sound is found, the other is not; we never find them contrasting in a minimal pair