Minimal pair

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In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, [1] and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones represent two separate phonemes in the language.

Contents

Many phonologists in the middle part of the 20th century had a strong interest in developing techniques for discovering the phonemes of unknown languages, and in some cases, they set up writing systems for the languages. The major work of Kenneth Pike on the subject is Phonemics: a technique for reducing languages to writing. [2] The minimal pair was an essential tool in the discovery process and was found by substitution or commutation tests. [3]

As an example for English vowels, the pair "let" + "lit" can be used to demonstrate that the phones [ɛ] (in let) and [ɪ] (in lit) actually represent distinct phonemes /ɛ/ and /ɪ/. An example for English consonants is the minimal pair of "pat" + "bat". The following table shows other pairs demonstrating the existence of various distinct phonemes in English. All of the possible minimal pairs for any language may be set out in the same way.

word 1word 2IPA 1IPA 2note
pinbin/pɪn//bɪn/initial consonant
rotlot/rɒt//lɒt/
thighthy/θaɪ//ðaɪ/
sealzeal/siːl//ziːl/
binbean/bɪn//biːn/vowel
penpan/pɛn//pæn/
cookkook/kʊk//kuːk/
hathad/hæt//hæd/final consonant
meanmeme/miːn//miːm/

Phonemic differentiation may vary between different dialects of a language so a particular minimal pair in one accent may be a pair of homophones in another. That means not that one of the phonemes is absent in the homonym accent but only that it is not contrastive in the same range of contexts.

Types

In addition to the minimal pairs of vowels and consonants provided above, others may be found:

Quantity

Many languages show contrasts between long and short vowels and consonants. A distinctive difference in length is attributed by some phonologists to a unit called a chroneme. Thus, Italian has the following minimal pair that is based on long and short /l/:

spellingIPAmeaning
pala/ˈpala/shovel
palla/ˈpalla/ball

However, in such a case it is not easy to decide whether a long vowel or consonant should be treated as having an added chroneme or simply as a geminate sound with phonemes.

Classical Latin, German, some Italian dialects, almost all Uralic languages, Thai, and many other languages also have distinctive length in vowels. An example is the cŭ/cū minimal pair in the Italian dialect that is spoken near Palmi (Calabria, Italy)[ clarification needed ]:

Dialect spoken in PalmiIPAQualityEtymologyLatinItalianEnglish
Cŭ voli?/kuˈvɔːli/shortcŭ < lat. qu(is) ("who?")Quis vult?Chi vuole?Who wants?
Cū voli?/kuːˈvɔːli/longcū < lat. qu(o) (ill)ŭ(m) ("for-what him?")Quō illum/illud vult?Per che cosa lo vuole?For what (reason) does he want him/it?

Syntactic gemination

In some languages like Italian, word-initial consonants are geminated after certain vowel-final words in the same prosodic unit. Sometimes, the phenomenon can create some syntactic-gemination-minimal-pairs:

Italian sandhi IPAMeaningSample sentenceMeaning of the sample sentence
dà casa/dakˈkaza/(he/she) gives (his/her) houseCarlo ci dà casa.Carlo gives us his house.
da casa/daˈkaza/from homeCarlo uscì da casa.Carlo got out from home.

In the example, the graphical accent on dà is just a diacritical mark that does not change the pronunciation of the word itself. However, in some specific areas, like Tuscany, both phrases are pronounced /daˈkkaːza/ and so can be distinguished only from the context.

Tone

Minimal pairs for tone contrasts in tone languages can be established; some writers refer to that as a contrast involving a toneme. For example, Kono, of Sierra Leone, distinguishes high tone and low tone on syllables: [4] [5]

tonewordmeaning
high/kɔ́ɔ́/'to mature'
low/kɔ̀ɔ̀/'rice'

Stress

Languages in which stress may occur in different positions within the word often have contrasts that can be shown in minimal pairs, as in Greek and Spanish:

wordlanguageIPAmeaning
ποτέGreek/poˈte/ever
πότεGreek/ˈpote/when
estaSpanish/ˈesta/this (feminine)
estáSpanish/esˈta/(he/she/it) is
supotTagalog/ˈsupot/bag
supótTagalog/suˈpot/uncircumcized

In English stress can determine the part of speech of a word: insult as a noun is /ˈɪnsʌlt/ while as a verb it is /ɪnˈsʌlt/. In certain cases it can also differentiate two words: below/bɪˈloʊ/ vs billow/ˈbɪloʊ/.

Juncture

Anglophones can distinguish between, for example, "great ape" and "grey tape", but phonemically, the two phrases are identical: /ɡreɪteɪp/. [6] The difference between the two phrases, which constitute a minimal pair, is said to be one of juncture. At the word boundary, a "plus juncture" /+/ has been posited and said to be the factor conditioning allophones to allow distinctivity: [7] in this example, the phrase "great ape" has an /eɪ/ diphthong shortened by pre-fortis clipping and, since it is not syllable-initial, a /t/ with little aspiration (variously [t˭], [ɾ], [ʔt], [ ʔ ], etc., depending on dialect); meanwhile in "grey tape", the /eɪ/ has its full length and the /t/ is aspirated [tʰ].

Only languages with allophonic differences associated with grammatical boundaries may have juncture as a phonological element. There is disagreement over whether or not French has phonological juncture: it seems likely that the difference between, for example, "des petits trous" (some little holes) and "des petites roues" (some little wheels), phonemically both /depətitʁu/, is only perceptible in slow, careful speech. [8] [9]

Minimal sets

The principle of a simple binary opposition between the two members of a minimal pair may be extended to cover a minimal set in which a number of words differ from one another in terms of one phone in a particular position in the word. [10] For example, the vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ of Swahili are shown to be distinct by the following set of words: pata 'hinge', peta 'bend', pita 'pass', pota 'twist', puta 'thrash'. [11] However, establishing such sets is not always straightforward  [12] and may require very complex study of multiple oppositions as expounded by, for example, Nikolai Trubetzkoy. [13]

Teaching

Minimal pairs were an important part of the theory of pronunciation teaching during its development in the period of structuralist linguistics, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, and minimal pair drills were widely used to train students to discriminate among the phonemes of the target language. [14] These drills took the form of minimal pair word drills and minimal pair sentence drills. For example, if the focus of a lesson was on the distinction /ɪ/ versus /ɛ/, learners might be asked to signal which sound they heard as the teacher pronounced lists of words with these phonemes such as lid/led, tin/ten, or slipped/slept. Minimal pair sentence drills consisted of paired sentences such as "He slipped on the floor/He slept on the floor." Again, learners would be asked to distinguish which of the sentences they heard as the teacher read them aloud. Another use of minimal pair drills was in pair work. Here, one member of the pair would be responsible for listening to the other member read the minimal pair word or sentence aloud and would be tasked with identifying which phoneme was being produced. In this form of classroom practice, both the skills of perception and production were practiced. Later writers have criticized the approach as being artificial and lacking in relevance to language learners' needs. [15] However, even today minimal pair listening and production drills remain a common tool for the teaching of segmental differences.

Some writers have claimed that learners are likely not to hear differences between phones if the difference is not a phonemic one. [16] [17] One of the objectives of contrastive analysis [18] of languages' sound systems was to identify points of likely difficulty for language learners that would arise from differences in phoneme inventories between the native language and the target language. However, experimental evidence for this claim is hard to find, and the claim should be treated with caution. [19]

In sign languages

In the past, signs were considered holistic forms without internal structure. However, the discovery in the mid-20th century that minimal pairs also exist in sign languages showed that sign languages have sublexical structure. [20] Signs consist of phonemes, which are specifications for location, movement, handshape, orientation, and non-manual elements. When signs differ in only one of these specifications, they form a minimal pair. For instance, the German Sign Language signs shoes and socks are identical in form apart from their handshapes.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Allophone</span> Phone used to pronounce a single phoneme

In phonology, an allophone is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive and the aspirated form are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai. Similarly, in Spanish, and are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English.

In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme is a set of phones that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech, how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information. Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language.

Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:

A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.

An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation. It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. English has two affricate phonemes, and, often spelled ch and j, respectively.

In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are the consonants y and w in yes and west, respectively. Written in IPA, y and w are near to the vowels ee and oo in seen and moon, written in IPA. The term glide may alternatively refer to any type of transitional sound, not necessarily a semivowel.

In phonetics, palatalization or palatization is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by affixing the letter ⟨ʲ⟩ to the base consonant. Palatalization cannot minimally distinguish words in most dialects of English, but it may do so in languages such as Russian, Japanese, Norwegian (dialects), Võro, Irish and Kashmiri.

English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.

In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Estonian, Finnish, Fijian, Japanese, Kannada, Kyrgyz, Latin, Malayalam, Old English, Scottish Gaelic, Tamil and Vietnamese.

Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress). Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel (schwa) or with certain other vowels that are described as being "reduced". Various phonological analyses exist for these phenomena.

Swedish has a large vowel inventory, with nine vowels distinguished in quality and to some degree in quantity, making 18 vowel phonemes in most dialects. Another notable feature is the pitch accent, a development which it shares with Norwegian. Swedish pronunciation of most consonants is similar to that of other Germanic languages.

In linguistics, a chroneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel or consonant. The noun chroneme is derived from Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos) 'time', and the suffixed -eme, which is analogous to the -eme in phoneme or morpheme. However, the term does not have wide currency and may be unknown even to phonologists who work on languages claimed to have chronemes.

In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that have distinctively extended duration compared with other sounds. There are long vowels as well as long consonants.

The phonology of Japanese features a phonemic inventory of five vowels and 15 or more consonants. The phonotactics are relatively simple, allowing for few consonant clusters. Japanese phonology has been affected by the presence of several layers of vocabulary in the language: in addition to native Japanese vocabulary, Japanese has a large amount of Chinese-based vocabulary and loanwords from other languages.

Flapping or tapping, also known as alveolar flapping, intervocalic flapping, or t-voicing, is a phonological process involving a voiced alveolar tap or flap; it is found in many varieties of English, especially North American, Cardiff, Ulster, Australian and New Zealand English, where the voiceless alveolar stop consonant phoneme is pronounced as a voiced alveolar flap, a sound produced by briefly tapping the alveolar ridge with the tongue, when placed between vowels. In London English, the flapped is perceived as a casual pronunciation intermediate between the "posh" affricate and the "rough" glottal stop. In some varieties,, the voiced counterpart of, may also be frequently pronounced as a flap in such positions, making pairs of words like latter and ladder sound similar or identical. In similar positions, the combination may be pronounced as a nasalized flap, making winter sound similar or identical to winner.

Unlike many languages, Icelandic has only very minor dialectal differences in sounds. The language has both monophthongs and diphthongs, and many consonants can be voiced or unvoiced.

This article discusses the phonological system of the Bulgarian language.

Juncture, in linguistics, is the manner of moving (transition) between two successive syllables in speech. An important type of juncture is the suprasegmental phonemic cue by means of which a listener can distinguish between two otherwise identical sequences of sounds that have different meanings.

Phonemic contrast refers to a minimal phonetic difference, that is, small differences in speech sounds, that makes a difference in how the sound is perceived by listeners, and can therefore lead to different mental lexical entries for words. For example, whether a sound is voiced or unvoiced matters for how a sound is perceived in many languages, such that changing this phonetic feature can yield a different word ; see Phoneme. Another example in English of a phonemic contrast would be the difference between leak and league; the minimal difference of voicing between [k] and [g] does lead to the two utterances being perceived as different words. On the other hand, an example that is not a phonemic contrast in English is the difference between and. In this case the minimal difference of vowel length is not a contrast in English and so those two forms would be perceived as different pronunciations of the same word seat.

References

  1. ↑ Jones, Daniel (January 1944). "Chronemes and tonemes: (a contribution to the study of the theory of phonemes)". Acta Linguistica. 4 (1): 11–10. doi:10.1080/03740463.1944.10410902.
  2. ↑ Pike, Kenneth (1947). Phonemics.
  3. ↑ Swadesh, Morris (June 1934). "The Phonemic Principle". Language. 10 (2): 117. doi:10.2307/409603. JSTOR   409603.
  4. ↑ Roach, Peter (2001). Phonetics. Oxford. p. 25. ISBN   978-0-19-437239-8.
  5. ↑ Manyeh, Morie Komba (1983). Aspects of Kono Phonology (PhD). University of Leeds. p. 152.
  6. ↑ O'Connor, J.D and Tooley, O. (1964) "The perceptibility of certain word-boundaries" in Abercrombie, D. et al In Honour of Daniel Jones, Longman, pp. 171-176
  7. ↑ Trager, G.L.; Smith, H.L. (1957). An Outline of English Structure. American Council of Learned Societies. p. 37.
  8. ↑ Jones, D. (1931) 'The "word" as a phonetic entity', Le Maitre Phonetique, 36, pp. 60-65 JSTOR   44704471
  9. ↑ Passy, P. (1913) Les Sons du Français, Didier, p. 61
  10. ↑ Ladefoged, P. (2006). A Course in Phonetics . Thomson, Wadsworth. pp.  35–6. ISBN   9781413006889.
  11. ↑ Ladefoged, P. (2001). Vowels and Consonants. p. 26.
  12. ↑ Fromkin and Rodman (1993). An Introduction to Language. pp. 218–220.
  13. ↑ Trubetzkoy, N. (1969). Principles of Phonology.
  14. ↑ Celce-Murcia; et al. (1996). Teaching Pronunciation. pp. 3–4.
  15. ↑ Brown, Gillian (1990). Listening to Spoken English. pp. 144–6.
  16. ↑ Lado, R. (1961). Language Testing. p. 15.
  17. ↑ Pennington, M. (1996). Phonology in English Language Teaching. p. 24.
  18. ↑ Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics across Cultures.
  19. ↑ Celce-Murcia; et al. (1996). Teaching Pronunciation. pp. 19–20.
  20. ↑ Stokoe, W. C. (2005-01-01). "Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf". Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. 10 (1): 3–37. doi:10.1093/deafed/eni001. ISSN   1465-7325. PMID   15585746.

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