Key Terms for Phonology

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Oct 30, 2023

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Key Terms for Phonology 1. Phoneme – meaningful sound in a language; in other words, a sound which if changed, changes the word it was in. 2. Allophone – predictable variation in the pronunciation of a phoneme, depending on the surrounding environment. 3. Minimal pair – two words which differ only in one sound – used as a way to see if a sound is phonemic 4. Contrastive distribution – phonemes are in contrastive distribution; that is, they contrast with each other in the same positions in minimal pairs. 5. Complementary distribution – allophones are in complementary distribution; that is, they appear only in certain environments and do no contrast with each other. 6. Insertion (epenthesis) - insertion of a sound when pronouncing a word to make it easier to say, as in schwa insertion in plural and past tense. 7. Deletion – when a sound is dropped in the pronunciation of a word, often in unstressed syllables; an example is the pronunciation of ‘cabinet’ as if it only had two syllables, i.e. /k æbnɪt/. 8. Metathesis – the switching of two sounds in a word; the most common example is / æks/ for / æsk/ 9. Assimilation – refers to when sounds in the same word become more similar to each other; the devoicing of /d/ to become /t/ in past tense suffixes for words ending in voiceless sounds (except /t/) is one example. Another example is vowel harmony, when vowels in neighboring syllables become more similar – for example, children I know say /riciz/ instead of /ric əz/ to refer to the candy. 10. Dissimilation – refers to when neighboring sounds become dissimilar, usually to make thing easier to say (remember the Latin example of /l/ + /l/) 11. Onset – first part of a syllable – may be one or more segments, as in / stɑp/. The onset consists of /st/ 12. Nucleus – the ‘center’ of a syllable, generally a vowel (in English can also be a syllabic liquid of nasal).

13. Coda – end of a syllable – can be one or more segments. In the example from #11, that would be the /p/ sound. 14. Prosody – word, phrase and sentence stress. 15. Tone – difference in pitch which can be phonemic, as in Chinese.

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