Basic Phonological Analysis

hello everyone welcome thanks for tuning in in this video i will be talking about how to perform basic phonological analysis this is a task that introductory linguistic students will see and probably be terrified at and it's something that linguists will have to do throughout their careers but it's excellent practice because it helps to distinguish between the difference between phonemes and allophones very generally and also gives you practice with individual languages when you're determining the relationship among sounds within that language so this is something that i've been wanting to do for sometimes to make a video on this because i know that a lot of students will encounter this in their introductory linguistics class so i thought i'd walk you through the process and doing that and give you some advice the first i just want to mention before i go any further it's really important that you watch my video on phonemes and allophones as well as my three-part series on phonetics that's necessary to give you a base of knowledge in order to understand the content of this video if you don't watch that content first then none of this stuff is going to make any sense to you so first by way of an overview here just to mention we will be looking at four phonological analysis problems from four different languages so when you're looking at a data set here the first thing i want to say is to just try to ignore anything that you may know or not know about that language if you don't know anything about cindy that's okay it's a language that's spoken in pakistan and india but just sort of look at this data set as if it's were it as if it were its own self-contained universe so conversely if you happen to know something about cindy just try to put all that aside and simplify your task because you're only focusing on this data here not on data that is not represented in this data set so what i have here at the top i think will be of use to you because it is essentially a two step process for solving a phonological analysis problem so let's walk through this very briefly now if you're looking at a data set like this and you're putting aside everything that you know or don't know the first step when looking at the data set before you is to identify minimal pairs now you might ask what is a minimal pair well let's stop and talk about this as i have here there are three minimal pairs that we could use to illustrate this concept a minimal pair is really important to understand and it's necessary to perform phonological analysis a minimal pair are two forms in a language that are the exact same except for one sound so let's talk about each of these examples a minimal pair in english could be the word heat and the word meat first thing you want to do is ignore how it is spelled in english and actually transcribe it into the international phonetic alphabet which is represented here in between the brackets so heat and meat they have the same vowel e they have the same final consonant but where they differ is in that initial initial consonant heat uses the glottal fricative and meat uses the bilabial nasal so they are two forms in a language that are the exact same except for one sound which is at the beginning similarly we can look at the difference between heat and hut they have the same initial consonant they have the same final consonant but this time where they differ is in their vowels so heat has this high vowel excuse me e and hut has this more central vowel a wedge so the last example is heat and heal whether to make better or the part of the body but either way it's another minimal pair here because they have the same initial consonant the same vowel but this time the difference is with that final consonant so these are three examples that illustrate a minimal pair again two forms in a language that are the exact same except for one sound so that's really important for our task here because you need to do that first when you're looking over a data set you want to identify if they are minimal pairs or not so if there are minimal pairs with the sounds in question then you know right off the bat that those sounds are different phonemes so going back to this example between heat and meat this one example tells us that in this context here and m are two different phonemes because it's a contrastive distribution if you change the consonant at the beginning of this word or in this context you know you might be talking about warmth as in heat and if you change it to a mu then it changes the meaning of the word to like convene or to meet so that's what phonemes do they are in contrastive distribution but allophones are in complementary distribution so again look through the data set and can you find minimal pairs with the sounds in question if you do then all you do is say okay they're different phonemes and i know this and you list the minimal pairs that's it now if you cannot find any minimal pairs with the sounds in question in the data set that you're looking at then you know that they must be allophones of the same phoneme and if that's the case you have to move to step two and this is where you have to determine the phonological environment in which each sound occurs that sounds scary but all you're determining is where you find each sound so for example one sound or one allophone might appear at the beginning of a word it might appear between vowels or at the end of words and another allophone might appear just after nasal sounds or after or before velar consonants so phonological environment is really just a fancy way of saying where do you get one sound and where do you get the other okay let's walk through this first data set here and again this is from the language cindy so we're actually looking for a minimal triplet because there are three sounds in question here and we have an aspirated excuse me an unaspirated p aspirated p and a b so again look over this data set and feel free to pause the video but can you identify a minimal triplet with these three sounds so you're looking for three forms that are the exact same except for one uses p one uses a aspirated p and the other uses b pause your video can you find a minimal triplet with those sounds so after looking it over you will see that the answer is yes there is a minimal triplet with these three sounds and that is in letter a which is anu in letter f which is panu and then in letter j which is banu so these three forms a f and j are a minimal triplet you have three forms that are the exact same except for that initial consonant sound where they differ using each of these sounds so if you see this sort of example then all you have to do at this point is write these three sounds are different phonemes because the minimal triplet is a f and j now incidentally you might notice that there are a couple of other uh minimal pairs like for example there is a minimal pair here with letter b and letter i the difference between vuju and baju but we can disregard that because it concerns a minimal pair with the sounds and notice in the instructions for this problem it's not asking about those sounds so we just put it aside forget about it ignore it we're only looking about the sounds in question here and we've determined that the minimal triplet is a f and j so you just write that down they're phonemes and here's the minimal triplet now let's move to our second problem and this is a totally different language and we're looking at two different sounds and this is standard italian so forget about what you might know or not know about this language just look at this data set as if it were its own self-contained universe so we just stick to our tool kit here and our first step tells us what we need to look for minimal pairs so feel free to pause the video and can you identify any minimal pairs with these two sounds so after looking over this data set you will see that no there are no minimal pairs with these two sounds so that means right off the bat we can tell that these two sounds must be allophones of the same phoneme in this language now we need to move to step two and step two in our instructions tells us we need to figure out the phonological environment or where you get one sound and where you get the other [Music] so the easiest thing that i would suggest you do when you are faced with this task is to write down the environments for each one of these sounds so what i've written here are the environments for each one of these sounds and that's what i suggest you do whether on a computer or if you have a hard copy and you're writing this down it's just a lot easier to visually organize the information and to be able to identify the patterns where each one of these sounds occur so we have two sounds that we're looking at again we have na which i've written down over here and we have um so let me just briefly talk about the shorthand that i'm using here to help me identify where each of these sounds occurs so like in letter a we have this uh the word tinta for die and so there is an n present in that in that word and that's where i'm leaving the blank here to represent the n but i'm really more concerned with the sounds immediately next to it so before it we have the vowel e representing with the lowercase i in the ipa and then we have right next to it a t written with a t in the ipa so you just do that with each form in which that sound appears and then in letter b in this data set again we see that nu appears after e but then before d and so forth now you might be wondering what is this pound symbol or hashtag and that means a word boundary so like in letter d in this data set nu appears at the very beginning of the word and i just use the hashtag pound symbol it's a common convention in linguistics to represent a word boundary and in this position it means in a word initial position and then right after it of course we get that so after you write down for basically yeah letters a through f those are the only forms in which the sound appears you have the environment laid out over here now on the other side of this page i have done the same thing but with the counterpart um so this is our velar nasal and we want to see where does this sound occur well it's actually kind of already organized for us because no appears in a through f and this data set and um appears in letters g through l in this data set but you're doing the same thing notice that um appears in between the vowel e and g so i've written it over here it occurs again in letter h after e and before uh made a mistake there should say it should say good but again for the word mushroom and so forth so you know try to try not to make errors like i just did there but you know it's good to double check your work of course so once you have the pattern sort of listed for both of these sounds now you have to compare where do you find one and where do you find the other so we could start with nuh and we could see it's appearing well before a t before a d before an e after vowels it looks like so kind of tough to determine a pattern there or maybe at the beginning of a word but it's a lot easier if we look at this sound instead so the velar nasal um well it's always occurring after vowels this can occur after vowels too so that's not the distinguishing criteria but notice here that um is always occurring before a or a k and no never does that so we have determined where you find this sound and then we're in a position where we can actually write this down as a kind of formalized rule which is something that you might be asked to do now what i've written up here is the rule that you would indicate to kind of summarize the differences in environments where each of these sounds occur so we've already identified that um occurs in this very specific environment preceding now if you look at the international phonetic alphabet you will notice that g and k have something in common and that is that they are both velar stops so you could actually indicate that in a rule you could say that the phoneme is realized or phonetically realized as the sound um and the slash means here in the environment before a velar sound or you could say velar stop or yet another uh way that you could write this is to write that the phoneme n is realized as the sound in the environment before and i'm just kind of using these other brackets to indicate it's both of those sounds so once you've determined that very specific environment in which um appears it is sufficient to indicate that the other allophone appears everywhere else so this is a very short way of doing that is that the phoneme n is realized as the allophone elsewhere so you can only write this elsewhere once you have indicated a very specific environment for the other allophone that accompanies it so this is essentially what you would be writing down for a question like the standard italian data set that you see here now i'm going to ask you to try to do this on your own so look at standard spanish first and then biblical hebrew and see if you can determine whether the sounds in question for standard spanish are different phonemes or whether they are allophones of the same phoneme and then do the same thing for biblical hebrew i'll give you a few minutes but what i mean by that is you should stop pause this video and try to work on this on your own and then unpause the video okay so hopefully you've taken a few minutes and uh if you're successful then you should see something like what i have written down here again first i've written down the environments for each one of these allophones de over here and the interdental fricative over here and you know you'll look at these and you'll say all right well i don't know it doesn't seem like it follows any discernible pattern for this sound duh but over here you'll notice that it occurs in a very specific environment that always only include is only happening in between vowels that never happens with the sound de so then we can write a rule which i have indicated down here that you get the phoneme d phonetically realized as the allophone in the environment between vowels so once you've written that it is totally sufficient to then say that you get the allophone d phonetically realized as the allophone everywhere else so that is what you would write for this problem here these two sounds are allophones and here's the rule that tells you where you get one allophone and where you get the other all right so now let's talk a little bit about the biblical hebrew problem down here so take a few minutes pause this video and determine the relationship between these two sounds here are they phonemes or are they allophones of the same phoneme pause this video and see if you can figure with it figure out which one it is okay so hopefully you've taken a few minutes and uh made some headway maybe you've even solved this problem now at first glance this is uh really difficult and it is indeed probably the most difficult out of these four problems but don't panic if you stick to your tool kit here and you have a careful eye then you can notice the pattern soon enough so the first thing is well there's no minimal pairs here with the sounds in question yeah we've got a minimal pair with b and c in this data set but that's between the sounds o and e and we're not concerned with those we are only concerned with the sounds so if you look through this data set unfortunately you won't see a minimal pair with those two sounds that means that these sounds must be allophones of the same phoneme so we need to figure out where we get one sound and where we get the other and i've written the environments in which p appears over on this margin and on this margin i've written down all the environments in which the sound appears so if you look through these then hopefully soon enough the pattern will become clear and will jump out to you and the pattern is this that with the allophone pu it always appears uh before a vowel no matter what it's always appearing before a vowel now with the sound its counterpart the other this allophone is always happening after a vowel sometimes it occurs before a vowel but what it always does is it always comes after a bowel so it maybe takes a little bit more time to identify but that's the rule that you would essentially write down here that the al excuse me that the phoneme p is phonetically realized as the allophone or unaspirated i guess in the environment before a vowel whereas the other allophone appears after a vowel so this is something that you can use in every phonological analysis problem that you encounter it's just a two-step process here you identify the minimal pairs first if you find minimal pairs with the sounds in question you know that those sounds belong to different phonemes and if they're different phonemes then you just have to show the minimal pairs that prove it but if there's no minimal pairs with the sounds in question in that data set then they must be allophones of the same phoneme and then you have to go to step two which is the hardest part of this process to determine the phonological environment in which each sound occurs so we did that and hopefully you found in the case of uh kind of walking through this and getting a little practice yourself that this is a bit easier it will of course get easier and easier the more practice you get with these and that's something that you should look for on the internet as there's a lot of phonological analysis problems to be found now in the meantime i want to say thank you so much for watching this video i hope it was helpful and i'll talk to you all soon thanks so much

hello everyone welcome thanks for tuning in in this video i will be talking about how to perform basic phonological analysis this is a task that introductory linguistic students will see and probably be terrified at and it&#39;s something that linguists will have to do throughout their careers but it&#39;s excellent practice because it helps to distinguish between the difference between phonemes and allophones very generally and also gives you practice with individual languages when you&#39;re determining the relationship among sounds within that language so this is something that i&#39;ve been wanting to do for sometimes to make a video on this because i know that a lot of students will encounter this in their introductory linguistics class so i thought i&#39;d walk you through the process and doing that and give you some advice the first i just want to mention before i go any further it&#39;s really important that you watch my video on phonemes and allophones as well as my three-part series on phonetics that&#39;s necessary to give you a base of knowledge in order to understand the content of this video if you don&#39;t watch that content first then none of this stuff is going to make any sense to you so first by way of an overview here just to mention we will be looking at four phonological analysis problems from four different languages so when you&#39;re looking at a data set here the first thing i want to say is to just try to ignore anything that you may know or not know about that language if you don&#39;t know anything about cindy that&#39;s okay it&#39;s a language that&#39;s spoken in pakistan and india but just sort of look at this data set as if it&#39;s were it as if it were its own self-contained universe so conversely if you happen to know something about cindy just try to put all that aside and simplify your task because you&#39;re only focusing on this data here not on data that is not represented in this data set so what i have here at the top i think will be of use to you because it is essentially a two step process for solving a phonological analysis problem so let&#39;s walk through this very briefly now if you&#39;re looking at a data set like this and you&#39;re putting aside everything that you know or don&#39;t know the first step when looking at the data set before you is to identify minimal pairs now you might ask what is a minimal pair well let&#39;s stop and talk about this as i have here there are three minimal pairs that we could use to illustrate this concept a minimal pair is really important to understand and it&#39;s necessary to perform phonological analysis a minimal pair are two forms in a language that are the exact same except for one sound so let&#39;s talk about each of these examples a minimal pair in english could be the word heat and the word meat first thing you want to do is ignore how it is spelled in english and actually transcribe it into the international phonetic alphabet which is represented here in between the brackets so heat and meat they have the same vowel e they have the same final consonant but where they differ is in that initial initial consonant heat uses the glottal fricative and meat uses the bilabial nasal so they are two forms in a language that are the exact same except for one sound which is at the beginning similarly we can look at the difference between heat and hut they have the same initial consonant they have the same final consonant but this time where they differ is in their vowels so heat has this high vowel excuse me e and hut has this more central vowel a wedge so the last example is heat and heal whether to make better or the part of the body but either way it&#39;s another minimal pair here because they have the same initial consonant the same vowel but this time the difference is with that final consonant so these are three examples that illustrate a minimal pair again two forms in a language that are the exact same except for one sound so that&#39;s really important for our task here because you need to do that first when you&#39;re looking over a data set you want to identify if they are minimal pairs or not so if there are minimal pairs with the sounds in question then you know right off the bat that those sounds are different phonemes so going back to this example between heat and meat this one example tells us that in this context here and m are two different phonemes because it&#39;s a contrastive distribution if you change the consonant at the beginning of this word or in this context you know you might be talking about warmth as in heat and if you change it to a mu then it changes the meaning of the word to like convene or to meet so that&#39;s what phonemes do they are in contrastive distribution but allophones are in complementary distribution so again look through the data set and can you find minimal pairs with the sounds in question if you do then all you do is say okay they&#39;re different phonemes and i know this and you list the minimal pairs that&#39;s it now if you cannot find any minimal pairs with the sounds in question in the data set that you&#39;re looking at then you know that they must be allophones of the same phoneme and if that&#39;s the case you have to move to step two and this is where you have to determine the phonological environment in which each sound occurs that sounds scary but all you&#39;re determining is where you find each sound so for example one sound or one allophone might appear at the beginning of a word it might appear between vowels or at the end of words and another allophone might appear just after nasal sounds or after or before velar consonants so phonological environment is really just a fancy way of saying where do you get one sound and where do you get the other okay let&#39;s walk through this first data set here and again this is from the language cindy so we&#39;re actually looking for a minimal triplet because there are three sounds in question here and we have an aspirated excuse me an unaspirated p aspirated p and a b so again look over this data set and feel free to pause the video but can you identify a minimal triplet with these three sounds so you&#39;re looking for three forms that are the exact same except for one uses p one uses a aspirated p and the other uses b pause your video can you find a minimal triplet with those sounds so after looking it over you will see that the answer is yes there is a minimal triplet with these three sounds and that is in letter a which is anu in letter f which is panu and then in letter j which is banu so these three forms a f and j are a minimal triplet you have three forms that are the exact same except for that initial consonant sound where they differ using each of these sounds so if you see this sort of example then all you have to do at this point is write these three sounds are different phonemes because the minimal triplet is a f and j now incidentally you might notice that there are a couple of other uh minimal pairs like for example there is a minimal pair here with letter b and letter i the difference between vuju and baju but we can disregard that because it concerns a minimal pair with the sounds and notice in the instructions for this problem it&#39;s not asking about those sounds so we just put it aside forget about it ignore it we&#39;re only looking about the sounds in question here and we&#39;ve determined that the minimal triplet is a f and j so you just write that down they&#39;re phonemes and here&#39;s the minimal triplet now let&#39;s move to our second problem and this is a totally different language and we&#39;re looking at two different sounds and this is standard italian so forget about what you might know or not know about this language just look at this data set as if it were its own self-contained universe so we just stick to our tool kit here and our first step tells us what we need to look for minimal pairs so feel free to pause the video and can you identify any minimal pairs with these two sounds so after looking over this data set you will see that no there are no minimal pairs with these two sounds so that means right off the bat we can tell that these two sounds must be allophones of the same phoneme in this language now we need to move to step two and step two in our instructions tells us we need to figure out the phonological environment or where you get one sound and where you get the other [Music] so the easiest thing that i would suggest you do when you are faced with this task is to write down the environments for each one of these sounds so what i&#39;ve written here are the environments for each one of these sounds and that&#39;s what i suggest you do whether on a computer or if you have a hard copy and you&#39;re writing this down it&#39;s just a lot easier to visually organize the information and to be able to identify the patterns where each one of these sounds occur so we have two sounds that we&#39;re looking at again we have na which i&#39;ve written down over here and we have um so let me just briefly talk about the shorthand that i&#39;m using here to help me identify where each of these sounds occurs so like in letter a we have this uh the word tinta for die and so there is an n present in that in that word and that&#39;s where i&#39;m leaving the blank here to represent the n but i&#39;m really more concerned with the sounds immediately next to it so before it we have the vowel e representing with the lowercase i in the ipa and then we have right next to it a t written with a t in the ipa so you just do that with each form in which that sound appears and then in letter b in this data set again we see that nu appears after e but then before d and so forth now you might be wondering what is this pound symbol or hashtag and that means a word boundary so like in letter d in this data set nu appears at the very beginning of the word and i just use the hashtag pound symbol it&#39;s a common convention in linguistics to represent a word boundary and in this position it means in a word initial position and then right after it of course we get that so after you write down for basically yeah letters a through f those are the only forms in which the sound appears you have the environment laid out over here now on the other side of this page i have done the same thing but with the counterpart um so this is our velar nasal and we want to see where does this sound occur well it&#39;s actually kind of already organized for us because no appears in a through f and this data set and um appears in letters g through l in this data set but you&#39;re doing the same thing notice that um appears in between the vowel e and g so i&#39;ve written it over here it occurs again in letter h after e and before uh made a mistake there should say it should say good but again for the word mushroom and so forth so you know try to try not to make errors like i just did there but you know it&#39;s good to double check your work of course so once you have the pattern sort of listed for both of these sounds now you have to compare where do you find one and where do you find the other so we could start with nuh and we could see it&#39;s appearing well before a t before a d before an e after vowels it looks like so kind of tough to determine a pattern there or maybe at the beginning of a word but it&#39;s a lot easier if we look at this sound instead so the velar nasal um well it&#39;s always occurring after vowels this can occur after vowels too so that&#39;s not the distinguishing criteria but notice here that um is always occurring before a or a k and no never does that so we have determined where you find this sound and then we&#39;re in a position where we can actually write this down as a kind of formalized rule which is something that you might be asked to do now what i&#39;ve written up here is the rule that you would indicate to kind of summarize the differences in environments where each of these sounds occur so we&#39;ve already identified that um occurs in this very specific environment preceding now if you look at the international phonetic alphabet you will notice that g and k have something in common and that is that they are both velar stops so you could actually indicate that in a rule you could say that the phoneme is realized or phonetically realized as the sound um and the slash means here in the environment before a velar sound or you could say velar stop or yet another uh way that you could write this is to write that the phoneme n is realized as the sound in the environment before and i&#39;m just kind of using these other brackets to indicate it&#39;s both of those sounds so once you&#39;ve determined that very specific environment in which um appears it is sufficient to indicate that the other allophone appears everywhere else so this is a very short way of doing that is that the phoneme n is realized as the allophone elsewhere so you can only write this elsewhere once you have indicated a very specific environment for the other allophone that accompanies it so this is essentially what you would be writing down for a question like the standard italian data set that you see here now i&#39;m going to ask you to try to do this on your own so look at standard spanish first and then biblical hebrew and see if you can determine whether the sounds in question for standard spanish are different phonemes or whether they are allophones of the same phoneme and then do the same thing for biblical hebrew i&#39;ll give you a few minutes but what i mean by that is you should stop pause this video and try to work on this on your own and then unpause the video okay so hopefully you&#39;ve taken a few minutes and uh if you&#39;re successful then you should see something like what i have written down here again first i&#39;ve written down the environments for each one of these allophones de over here and the interdental fricative over here and you know you&#39;ll look at these and you&#39;ll say all right well i don&#39;t know it doesn&#39;t seem like it follows any discernible pattern for this sound duh but over here you&#39;ll notice that it occurs in a very specific environment that always only include is only happening in between vowels that never happens with the sound de so then we can write a rule which i have indicated down here that you get the phoneme d phonetically realized as the allophone in the environment between vowels so once you&#39;ve written that it is totally sufficient to then say that you get the allophone d phonetically realized as the allophone everywhere else so that is what you would write for this problem here these two sounds are allophones and here&#39;s the rule that tells you where you get one allophone and where you get the other all right so now let&#39;s talk a little bit about the biblical hebrew problem down here so take a few minutes pause this video and determine the relationship between these two sounds here are they phonemes or are they allophones of the same phoneme pause this video and see if you can figure with it figure out which one it is okay so hopefully you&#39;ve taken a few minutes and uh made some headway maybe you&#39;ve even solved this problem now at first glance this is uh really difficult and it is indeed probably the most difficult out of these four problems but don&#39;t panic if you stick to your tool kit here and you have a careful eye then you can notice the pattern soon enough so the first thing is well there&#39;s no minimal pairs here with the sounds in question yeah we&#39;ve got a minimal pair with b and c in this data set but that&#39;s between the sounds o and e and we&#39;re not concerned with those we are only concerned with the sounds so if you look through this data set unfortunately you won&#39;t see a minimal pair with those two sounds that means that these sounds must be allophones of the same phoneme so we need to figure out where we get one sound and where we get the other and i&#39;ve written the environments in which p appears over on this margin and on this margin i&#39;ve written down all the environments in which the sound appears so if you look through these then hopefully soon enough the pattern will become clear and will jump out to you and the pattern is this that with the allophone pu it always appears uh before a vowel no matter what it&#39;s always appearing before a vowel now with the sound its counterpart the other this allophone is always happening after a vowel sometimes it occurs before a vowel but what it always does is it always comes after a bowel so it maybe takes a little bit more time to identify but that&#39;s the rule that you would essentially write down here that the al excuse me that the phoneme p is phonetically realized as the allophone or unaspirated i guess in the environment before a vowel whereas the other allophone appears after a vowel so this is something that you can use in every phonological analysis problem that you encounter it&#39;s just a two-step process here you identify the minimal pairs first if you find minimal pairs with the sounds in question you know that those sounds belong to different phonemes and if they&#39;re different phonemes then you just have to show the minimal pairs that prove it but if there&#39;s no minimal pairs with the sounds in question in that data set then they must be allophones of the same phoneme and then you have to go to step two which is the hardest part of this process to determine the phonological environment in which each sound occurs so we did that and hopefully you found in the case of uh kind of walking through this and getting a little practice yourself that this is a bit easier it will of course get easier and easier the more practice you get with these and that&#39;s something that you should look for on the internet as there&#39;s a lot of phonological analysis problems to be found now in the meantime i want to say thank you so much for watching this video i hope it was helpful and i&#39;ll talk to you all soon thanks so much

Transcript for:Basic Phonological Analysis

Transcript for:
Basic Phonological Analysis