Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language - Coggle Diagram
Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
The study of how speech sounds form patterns is phonology.
The word phonology refers both to the linguistic knowledge that speakers have about the sound patterns of their language and to the description of that knowledge that linguists try to produce.
Phonology tells you what sounds are in your language and which ones are foreign
The Pronunciation of Morphemes
Knowledge of phonology determines how we pronounce words and the parts of words we call morphemes.
The Pronunciation of Plurals
The spelling, which adds
s
or
es
, is misleading
Allomorph
it’s useful to make a chart that records the phonological environments in which each vari-ant of the morpheme is known to occur.
Look for some property of the environment associated with each group of allomorphs.
A
minimal pair
is two words with different meanings that are identical except for one sound segment that occurs in the same place in each word.
Minimal pairs whose members take different allomorphs are particularly useful for our search.
The distribution of plural allomorphs in English is conditioned by the final segment of the singular form.
Morphophonemic rules
: Such rules concern the pronunciation of specific morphemes.
The rules tell us when the default does not apply:
1.
Insert a [ə] before the plural morpheme /z/ when a regular noun ends in a sibilant, giving [əz].
2.
Change the plural morpheme /z/ to a voiceless [s] when preceded by a voiceless sound.
Additional Examples of Allomorphs
That the rules of phonology are based on properties of segments rather than on individual words is one of the factors that makes it possible for young chil-dren to learn their native language in a relatively short period.
The rule that describes the distribution of allomorphs is:
Change the place of articulation of the nasal negative morpheme to agree with the place of articulation of a following consonant.
The rule that changes the pronunciation of nasal consonants:
Is called the homorganic nasal rule
Phonemes: The Phonological Units of Language
These rules express our knowledge about the sound patterns of the entire language.
Each phoneme has associated with it one or more sounds, called allophones, which represent the actual sound correspond-ing to the phoneme in various environments.
Phonological rules operate on phonemes to make explicit which allophones are pronounced in which environments.
Phonemes are not physical sounds.
They are abstract mental representations of the phonological units of a language, the units used to represent words in our mental lexicon.
The phonological rules of the language apply to phonemes to determine the pronunciation of words.
A particular realization (pronunciation) of a phoneme is called a
phone
.
The collection of phones that are the realizations of the same phoneme are called the allophones of that phoneme.