第4章　语言模式

Study questions

1What is the difference between a phoneme and an allophone?

Key: (1) Substituting one phoneme for another changes both pronunciation and meaning.

(2) Substituting one allophone for another only changes its pronunciation.

2What is an aspirated sound and which of the following words would normally be pronounced with one: kill, pool, skill, spool, stop, top?

Key: An aspirated sound is one pronounced with a stronger puff of air. Words containing aspirated consonants in initial position are kill, pool and top.

3Which of the following words would be treated as minimal pairs?

ban, fat, pit, bell, tape, heat, meal, more, pat, tap, pen, chain, vote, bet, far, bun, goat, heel, sane, tale, vet

Key: ban–bun, fat–pat, fat–far, pit–pat, bell–bet, tape–tale, heat–heel, meal–heel, chain–sane, vote–goat

4What is meant by the phonotactics of a language?

Key: The phonotactics of a language are the permitted arrangements of sounds that obey constraints on the sequence and ordering of phonemes in that language.

5What is the difference between an open and a closed syllable?

Key: (1) An open syllable ends with a vowel (as nucleus)

(2) A closed syllable ends with a consonant (as coda)

6Which segments in the pronunciation of the following words are most likely to be affected by elision?

(i) government

(ii) postman

(iii) pumpkin

(iv) sandwich

(v) victory

Key: (i) /n/; (ii) /t/; (iii) /p/; (iv) /d/

Tasks

A. What are diacritics and which ones were used in this chapter to identify sounds?

Key: A diacritic is a mark placed above, through or below a letter, in order to indicate a sound different from that indicated by the letter without the diacritic.

D. Individual sounds are described as segments. What are suprasegmentals?

Key: The term suprasegmental refers to properties of an utterance that apply to groups of segments, rather than to individual segments. For example, stress is generally assigned to a syllable rather than to an individual sound. The three main suprasegmental features are stress, intonation, and tone.

(1) Stress: Emphasis, conveyed through differences in pitch, loudness, or duration that distinguishes a stress-bearing union (often a syllable) from neighboring units. In some languages (not English), stress is contrastive (i.e. stress alone can distinguish between two otherwise identical words). An English word with initial stress is escapade. An English word with final stress is understood.

(2) Intonation—The pattern of rising and falling pitch over an utterance. In English, rising pitch is often used to indicate a question (‘Mary likes John?’), while falling pitch is usually characteristic of a declarative sentence (‘Mary likes John.’).

(3) Tone—The use of pitch on a sequence of sounds to convey lexical information. In English, tone is not contrastive, but it many languages it is. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the same syllable ma has four different meanings, depending on which tone is used.

E. The English words lesson and little are typically pronounced with syllabic consonants.

(i) What exactly is a syllabic consonant and how would it appear in a phonetic transcription?

Key: (1) A syllabic consonant is a consonant that can form an entire syllable on its own, without any vowels.

(2) When transcribing speech phonetically, syllabic consonants appear quite often. Even discounting onomatopoeia, we have three or four of them that commonly appear in English.

There is a way to indicate that an ‘m’, ‘n’, ‘l’, ‘r’, or any other consonant is acting as a syllabic consonant — simply place a small, short vertical line underneath the letter in question. In practice this usually ends up being a small dot.

(ii) Which of these words would most likely be pronounced with a syllabic consonant:

bottle, bottom, button, castle, copper, cotton, paddle, schism, wooden?

Key: bottle, bottom, button, castle, copper, cotton, paddle, schism, wooden?

F. A general distinction can be made among languages depending on their basic rhythm, whether they have syllable-timing or stress-timing. How are these two types of rhythm distinguished and which type characterizes the pronunciation of English, French and Spanish?

Key: In a syllable-timing language, all syllables are of approximately equal length;

In a stress-timing language, there are approximately equal intervals of time between stressed syllables.

English and Spanish are stress-timed; French is syllable-timed.