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Phonology: Terminology
Phonology: Terminology
Phonology: Terminology
Phonology
studies the sound system of the language; the module of grammar that
includes:
1. inventory of phonemes (phonetic and phonemic units), and
2. rules for their combination and pronunciation (free and
allophonic variation)
Phoneme
the basic, distinctive (contrastive) structural unit in the sound system
of a language that can have alternative realizations (allophones) in
particular phonological environments
Minimal pair
two words distinguished from one another by a single phonetic
contrast, i.e., identical except for one phoneme that occurs in the
same position in each word: pain /pen/, bane /ben/, main /men/
Free variation
Alternative pronunciations of a word in which one sound is
substituted for another without changing the word’s meaning: English
word-final stops – bottle [batәl] or [baDәl]
Complementary distribution
a pattern of distribution of two or more sounds that do not occur in the
same position within words in a given language, that is, they occur in
mutually exclusive environments (never overlap: in English [ph] does
not occur where [p] occurs (and vice versa)
Phonological analysis