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Study questions
1. What is thedifference between a phoneme and an allophone?
Key: (1) Substituting one phonemefor another changes both pronunciation and meaning.
(2) Substituting one allophone for another only changes its pronunciation.
2. What is an aspirated sound and which of thefollowing words would normally be pronounced with one: kill, pool, skill,spool, stop, top?
Key: An aspirated sound is onepronounced with a stronger puff of air. Words containing aspirated consonantsin initial position are kill, pool and top.
3. Which of thefollowing 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
4. What is meant by thephonotactics of a language?
Key: The phonotactis of a languageare the permitted arrangements of sounds that obey constraints on the sequenceand ordering of phonemes in that language.
5. What is thedifference between an open and a closed syllable?
Key: (1) An open syllable ends witha vowel (as nucleus)
(2) A closed syllable ends with a consonant (as coda)
6. Which segments in thepronunciation 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 diacriticsand which ones were used in this chapter to identify sounds?
Key: A diacritic is a mark placedabove, through or below a letter, in order to indicate a sound different fromthat indicated by the letter without the diacritic.
D. Individual sounds aredescribed as segments. What are suprasegmentals?
Key: The term suprasegmental refersto properties of an utterance that apply to groups of segments, rather than to individualsegments. For example, stress is generally assigned to a syllable rather thanto an individual sound. The three main suprasegmental features are stress,intonation, and tone.
(3) Tone—The use of pitch on a sequence of sounds to convey lexicalinformation. In English, tone is not contrastive, but it many languages it is.For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the same syllable ma has four differentmeanings, depending on which tone is used.
E. The English words lessonand little are typically pronounced with syllabic consonants.
(i) What exactly is a syllabic consonant and how would itappear in a phonetic transcription?
Key: (1) A syllabic consonant is aconsonant that can form an entire syllable on its own, without any vowels.
(2) When transcribing speech phonetically, syllabic consonantsappear quite often. Even discounting onomatopoeia, we have three or four ofthem that commonly appear in English.
There is a way to indicate that an ‘m’, ‘n’, ‘l’, ‘r’, or any otherconsonant is acting as a syllabic consonant — simply place a small, shortvertical line underneath the letter in question. In practice this usually endsup being a small dot.
(ii) Which of these words would most likely be pronouncedwith 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 amonglanguages depending on their basic rhythm, whether they have syllable-timing orstress-timing. How are these two types of rhythm distinguished and which typecharacterizes the pronunciation of English, French and Spanish?
Key: In a syllable-timing language, allsyllables are of approximately equal length;
In a stress-timing language, there are approximately equal intervalsof time between stressed syllables.
English and Spanish are stress-timed; French is syllable-timed.