Phonology 音位学思维导图

Phonemes are minimal distinctive units in the sound system of a language

 Allophones are the phonetic variants and realizations of a particular phoneme

The smallest identifiable phonetic unit found in a stream of speech is called a phone.

 Minimal pair means words which differ from each other only by one sound.

If two or more sounds can occur in the same environment and the substitution of one sound for another brings about a change of meaning, they are said to be in contrastive distribution.

If two or more sounds never appear in the same environment ,then they are said to be in complementary distribution

When two sounds can appear in the same environment and the substitution of one for the other does not cause any change in meaning, then they are said to be in free variation.

 A distinctive feature is a feature which distinguishes one phoneme from another.

The distinctive (phonological) features which apply to groups larger than the single segment are known as suprasegmental features.

Tone languages are those which use pitch to contrast meaning at word level.

Intonation languages are those which use pitch to distinguish meaning at phrase level or sentence level.

Juncture refers to the phonetic boundary features which may demarcate grammatical units.

Phonetics is the study of the production, perception, and physical properties of speech sounds, while phonology attempts to account for how they are combined, organized, and convey meaning in particular languages.

Phonetics is the study of the actual sounds while phonology is concerned with a more abstract description of speech sounds and tries to describe the regularities of sound patterns.

The two forms are different in meaning

The two forms are different in one sound segment

The different sounds occur in the same position of the two strings.

Contrastive distribution. Sounds [m] in met and [n] in net are in contrastive distribution because substituting [m] for [n] will result in a change of meaning.

Complementary distribution. The aspirated plosive [ph] and the unaspirated plosive [p] are in complementary distribution because the former occurs either initially in a word or initially in a stressed syllable while the latter never occurs in such environments

Free variation. In English, the word “direct” may be pronounce in two ways: /di’rekt/ and /dia’rekt/, and the two different sounds /i/ and /ai/ can be said to be in free variation

1) Distinctive features, which are used to distinguish one phoneme from another and thus have effect on one sound segment, are referred to as segmental features.

 2) The distinctive (phonological) features which apply to groups larger than the single segment are known as suprasegmental features.

 3) Suprasegmental features may have effect on more than one sound segment. They may apply to a string of several sounds.