Language Files Chapter 3

Question 1

phonology

Answer 1

The study of how signs are organized within a language and how they interact with each other.

Question 2

phonetic inventories

Answer 2

the sounds that are produced as part of the language

Question 3

phonotactic constraints

Answer 3

restrictions on possible combinations of sounds

Question 4

phonetic environment

Answer 4

sounds that come before and after the phone in a word

Question 5

contrastive distribution

Answer 5

occurs when two sounds occur in the same phonetic environment. using one rather than the other can change the meaning of the word.

Question 6

minimal pair

Answer 6

two words with different meaning , whose pronunciation differs by one sound

Question 7

complementary distribution

Answer 7

sounds that do not occur in the same phonetic environment , but whose distributions compliment each other. ex: lean and leap

Question 8

obstruents

Answer 8

sounds produced within the obstruction of the airflow. ex: stops, fricatives, affricates

Question 9

sonorants

Answer 9

segments produced with an open passage from the airflow. ex: nasals,glides, vowels

Question 10

palatalization

Answer 10

a type of assimilation in which a consonant becomes a neighboring palatal.

Question 11

vowel harmony

Answer 11

a back vowel becomes front when preceded by a front vowel in the same word.

Question 12

obligatory English rules

Answer 12

include 
aspiration 
vowel nasalization
vowel lengthening
liquid/glide de-voicing

Question 13

optional English rules

Answer 13

may or may not apply in given utterance

optional rules are responsible for variations in speech

Question 14

What are the four implication laws?

Answer 14

sound inventories
frequency and distribution
aquisition of sound
sound change

Question 15

phonemes

Answer 15

psychological units of of linguistic structure not physically present in a stream of speech.

Question 16

basic allophone

Answer 16

allophone of a phoneme that is used when non of the change-inducing conditions are fulfilled

Question 17

Restricted allophone

Answer 17

an allophone that appears in a more limited set of phonetic environments.

Question 18

near minimal pair

Answer 18

almost identical apart from the contrastive sounds

Question 19

contrastive

Answer 19

a term used to describe two sounds that can be used to differentiate words in a language.

Question 20

1st goal of phonemic analysis

Answer 20

“phonemes make a distinction in meaning, if two sounds are members of different phonemes minimal pairs can almost always be found “pg 134

Question 21

overlapping distribution

Answer 21

the occurrence of sounds in the same phonetic environment.

Question 22

2nd goal of phonemic analysis

Answer 22

allophones of a phoneme are not random collections but a set of sounds that have the same psychological function

Question 23

environment

Answer 23

sounds that immediately proceed and follow it within a word.

Question 24

maximally distinct

Answer 24

consonants have very few qualities in common with the vowels and vise versa

Question 25

distribution

Answer 25

the set of phonetic environments in which sounds occur.