Introduction to Linguistics Minimal Pairs Phonemes Allophones

welcome back to intro Linguistics today we're going to start phenology so we're going to look at minimal pairs phones alones and show some examples of these variations so you understand what alphones are so minimal pairs minimal pairs uses phonetics and we find two words that are similar except for one sound and we see if those words have different meanings so this sounds weird coming from an English perspective but once we do couple examples I'll explain how this works with other languages and how it can be useful so for instance we have two words Sip and zip so these are two English words Sip and zip they differ in this one sound and Zed and they mean different things so we know that and Zed are separate sounds in English so we already knew that but this just gives us evidence and let's take look at bit and beat so this and this we have the word bit we have the word beat they mean two different things so they are minimal Pairs and they are separate in English as well so when you're looking at language that you've never seen before and you see transcription like like maybe you see this beat and then you see beat and they both mean the same thing in another language this and this this means that they don't make distinction between these sounds that's what it means so we make distinction between and Zed we make distinction between it and but another language might not so that's what minimal pairs tell us another important Concept in phology is complimentary distribution so this is where we take two sounds but they never occur in the same environment so for instance bit and beat this and this they both occur after and before so they're not in complimentary distribution they can appear in the same environment however when we take look at bead and beat in bead we have this lengthening we have this lengthening of the eye and in beat we don't now this lengthening occurs before voiced consonant so we see this in the word C's as well so for C's this is lengthened this is lengthened before Zed which is voiced consonant but in CE we don't see this lengthening so what this means is that this and this they're not minimal pairs okay they're not minimal pairs so we do make we don't make any distinction between them in our meanings so if we say bead or bead they're both the same word so we don't hear distinction there however they don't appear in the same environment they appear in mutually exclusive environments which means they will never overlap so we'll never see this lowercase or sorry this this short before voice at least in Western Canadian English this may vary depending on where you are this is purely an example of Western Canadian English Okay so that's complimentary distribution now how we use those is important but first we should talk about phones and alones so when you don't make distinction between two sounds you have this situation where the phon which is the underlying representation so this is single sound they turn into alphones which are variations of that sound so this is kind of like this is the main sound and these down here are the variations so we don't hear difference between the variations in English so this and this we might hear it little bit but we don't really make distinction between it and these alones will always occur in different environments so for instance this long occurs before vo consonants but the short will appear in every other environment where that sound is so we could say that if there's voice consonant after it it lengthens this the sound so these are Al aponic variations of the phon so that's the difference the phon is the general main sound and the the alfone is the specific sound in certain environments so let's take look at English we have four words here we have cop pack bucket and cord so we're looking at these K's here so this the and what do we notice two of these have these aspiration in them this at the top is aspiration meaning when we say air flows out of the mouth well when we say pack there's not really burst of air at the end or bucket there's no burst of air after the so the other thing should point out is that of course these markers here are stress markers that's where primary stress is which is important for this analysis so what's the rule here we have two Cas cop pack bucket Accord these are two different KS and we don't really make distinction between them in English in fact you might not have even noticed their different KS until you saw this video which is how felt when took my first course so where do these K's occur where is the different from the okay so we see this aspirated occurs directly after the stress marker so we could say in in primary stress syllable primary stress that could be good way we describe it we might call that the onset because it's the first sound in the syllable we'll talk about onsets in the next video so that's way we could say we could say it's in word initial but we see this ACC chord here it's the second letter it's the second syllable but the stress is there so we say and then for this other we'll just say elsewhere because we don't want rule for all the environments we don't have we don't want to say okay it could be at the end of word in the middle of word we usually pick the most precise one and say okay that super precise scenario is its own Rule and this more General where it occurs everywhere that's just the default so we could say that this phoning becomes an erated when it's in the onset of the primary stress syllable otherwise it's just regular so that's the kind of rule we can say so that's an English example you'll see the same thing with and it's exactly the same rule which if you know the properties of these sounds there's not really much of difference except for their location so hey that's an English variation kind of cool thing so let's take an example from different language okay so we have the word to cut and to polish cut is got polish is cot now know if you're an English speaker you probably heard me say got as that's not that's an unaspirated know it sounds like it's an unaspirated we're very bad at distinguishing between actual G's and unaspirated case okay so what we notice here is that these are actually minimal pairs because these sounds here they're in the same environment but they mean different things so we don't make distinction in English between these two sounds but in this language here as long as as well as many others there is distinguish between these sounds fact think in Korean there is as well I'm not entirely sure sure though so that is why we need to take look at minimal pairs because when we are facing an exam problem or we're talking to speakers and we see that there's and there an aspirated it must have the same pattern as English that is simply not true we should never assume that other languages have the exact same patterns as English so in this language these sounds are separate in English they're not okay so here's data set here is seven words on an exam you might get this probably get more data you probably get some fillers to throw you off too let's take look at this how do we approach this that's what I'm going to teach you here is how do you approach this first of all you take look at the IPA description first all these English words ignore them at first so slip glim blue clip play Love fle what is the common letter we see everywhere here all these words have L's in them it might be something to do with the vowels but the first thing see are L's love play slip gleen blue clip okay let's take look at the L's let's Circle them so we know what we're looking at here we see two distinctions here we see this with the circle under it so this is not cabic this is voiceless so where is this occurring this is occurring after this here and it's occurring after the so my first thought is okay maybe after voiceless consonants it is voiceless okay so our first rule is after voiceless consonants we get this here okay so let's compare it to everything else okay slip this is voiceless consonant so this is problem so it can't be consonants because of this here but we take look at glimm okay we're still covered here we're still covered in blue clip is good play is good love is good fle also is problem because this is also voiceless consonant so we have to narrow it down more to this and this so we're going to say it's after voiceless stops or plosives so after voiceless stops we get this this unvoiced or devoiced and otherwise we get just the regular that we're used to really should not put the slanty brackets should put the square brackets okay so maybe that's what we have here so we looked at the data set we came up with this hypothesis and we don't have any more data so can't verify it any further we just have to say okay look this is all the examiner gave us it should be enough to solve it so those are the exam tips first we check to see those minimal Pairs and like we did before we did the we didn't really look for minimal pairs because it's an English example and we know how English makes distinctions between sounds for the most part so we ignored that part but with other languages for minimal pairs look look for the weird symbols so when facing language you don't know you have to look for sounds that appear in almost every word so for instance this appeared in every single word so it's probably the target we also see this little weird Circle under the which means that well we haven't seen it before it's probably the focus of the exam question what is this circle here what is this weird thing we've never seen before well that's what you're trying to figure out that's tip number two tip number three is when you use rules which we'll go to in few videos the rules are for more specific environments so for instance when we're given this distinction here and we take look at all these words should we specify conditions for the voiceless here because it's not in many situations so maybe the specif or maybe when we describe where it occurs it might be better for these very small environments because describing all the environments for this regular here take lot of work we have to say it's at the beginning of words it's after voiceless fricatives it's after vo stops it's lot of environments so maybe this more specific one is better way to describe it so if something occurs in fewer environments that's probably the one we want to describe so for instance does this go to the voiceless in certain situations or do we default in the voiceless and turn it into voiced in some situations so that's the distinction you have to make the simpler the rule the better so if you can describe situation in one rule do that don't describe it in three or four rules because you're probably not describing the right process then okay so that is first video next time we'll tackle syllables so we'll talk about structure sority hierarchy setting them up and we're going to take look at this aspirated example again with syllables so if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below and hope to see you in the next video