Welcome to Ace Linguistics. This channel is about all things linguistic. Discussing topics in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and sociolinguistics. So let's see what we've got today. We talked about distribution.
I introduced the concept of distribution, which means distribution of sounds, two or more sounds in question. So you're studying two sounds and you want to know whether these two sounds, these two phones in a given language are two phonemes or they are allophones of the same phoneme. You start looking for evidence and you find minimal pairs.
That's contrasted distribution. But then there's other kinds of distribution that you may come across in a given language regarding two or more sounds. So if you remember in contrastive distribution, the two sounds in question occur in minimal pairs, which means in words that have the same number of sounds and they differ only in one sound and those sounds are in the same position. Now we are dealing with the second kind of distribution of sounds which is called complementary distribution.
Let me give you an example of three words tap step and bat. I can go online And play these words. Tap.
The second word is... Step. Then bat. Bat.
Okay. If you take these three words and transcribe them, in the first word, the way the ta is pronounced, it's aspirated. In the second word, it's not aspirated.
And in the third word, it's not aspirated either. Actually, most of the time, not only is it not aspirated, it is also, it doesn't have an audible release. This word, most of the time, most people pronounce it unreleased, bat.
So if you look at ta, the way it's pronounced in these three words, you see, so there's two kinds of ta. There is the aspirated ta, and then there is the unaspirated ta. They don't occur in the same position. This one. is occurring word initially followed by a vowel.
This one is occurring preceded by a sa. And this is word finally. So let me put it in technical notation.
This one occurs preceded by nothing. This is where the sound occurs. Okay. This is the environment for this.
This is preceded by this. And then here it's preceded by a. and followed by nothing. Word final boundary. So you see these three environments, they're different, right?
Only word initially followed by a vowel, it becomes aspirated. Otherwise, it's not aspirated. These different variations of ta, you see, they don't occur in the same environment.
We can write a rule about this. We can express this in a particular kind of notation. Ta becomes aspirated whenever it occurs in the beginning of a word.
followed by a vowel and then ta stays the same elsewhere. This is according to the data given. Okay so as we come across new data we will adapt accordingly but as you see that's the case here. Okay so I want to give examples of complementary distribution from a different language.
Examples from Tehran Persian. Persian spoken in the capital of Iran. Let's look at the sound in question. Use the Q letter. So here I have transliterated Persian words, which means I have written them in a different alphabet, which in this case is Latin.
So this word, which is pronounced as Baghali, means broad bean or faba bean. This one, which is pronounced Otaq, means room. This one Qous, which means curve or maybe ark.
This is Yari means rebel. And then this is agha, is mister or man. This is baqi, which means remaining. It's an adjective.
Sanduq, which means chest, footlocker or trunk. Qufl, which means lock. And laq, which means loose, like a tooth, for example, when it's loose.
Okay, so now if you look at the sound in question, you would see that sometimes if you look at the phonetic chart, it's the... voiced velar fricative. I think even in Spanish it exists.
It's the intervocalic ga in Spanish. This other sound is the uvular. It's a voiced uvular plosive. The same letter is pronounced differently and we will see why.
So now I'm going to to list the environments for each of these. Okay so here If you look at the sound in question, it's preceded by a vowel and followed by a. Here, it's preceded by a, and it's followed by the final word boundary.
So in these words, we are dealing with the voiced uvular plosive. But here, we are dealing with the voiced fricative. We have two sets of environments here. So the same sound.
sometimes becomes this sometimes becomes a sometimes becomes if you look at the environments carefully this is there's more environments here than this probably this is the main phoneme which sometimes becomes this if you look at the environment you will clearly see when can you guess if you look at the patterns you see here in both cases i can actually simplify both of the environments into one I can say when is preceded and followed by a vowel and this environment you don't see it here. You see preceded or followed by a vowel but you don't see it both preceded and followed. So now you can you can write a distribution statement for this. I'm going to write a distribution statement for that. So this symbol okay this becomes this whenever it is interval It is elsewhere.
Okay. One important thing here in terms of notation is, okay, you see here I've used slashes. Here I've used square brackets. Okay. So the slash shows that this is a phoneme.
And these are the allophones. This is basically how we use symbols. For the phoneme, it's slash.
For the allophones, it's or. This is a mental construct. It's a cognitive construct.
in our head. It's not pronounced. Once you pronounce it, it becomes an allophone. Either I would say agha or I would say qa. So even if I say agha, I'm already putting it in an intervocalic environment in order to be able to pronounce it.
Or even if I say qa, then I'm putting it in a syllable initial position followed by a vowel. Qa, agha. So the point is, this is Basically, I could say this is unpronounceable because once it's pronounced, it becomes an allophone.
So that's how phoneme is just a cognitive construct in our head. Thanks for your time and attention and see you again soon.