Contrastive Analysis CPA By Thuy Thanh Nguyen English Department Hanoi University Outline ● ● ● Contrastive Phonetic Analysis Contrastive Phonology Analysis Practice Phonetics - A branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds O’Grady (2005) - Phoneticians → the physical properties of speech + articulatory phonetics: the way humans plan and execute movements to produce speech + acoustic phonetics: the way such various movements influence the resulting sound + auditory phonetics: the way humans convert sound waves to linguistic information - The smallest unit: a phone Articulatory phonetics - Provides descriptions of speech sounds in terms of their articulations (how articulators/vocal organs move to make sounds) - speech as sequences of separate segments called consonants and vowels, and sounds as a combination of articulatory properties. - To obtain knowledge about these sequences, phoneticians use several laboratory techniques, such as electropalatography (EPG) or ultrasound. Acoustic phonetics - studies the sound in the air that travels from a speaker to a listener. phoneticians need to turn sounds into visual representations, and from these graphs, we can analyze and compare frequencies and other properties of sounds, Acoustic phonetics (cont.) - Results of measurements: - duration, - intensity, - and pitch Auditory phonetics - - - Main concern: is the action of speech sounds hearing and their perception in the listener’s perspective → studies surround the relationships between speech stimuli and a listener’s responses to such stimuli, Physical properties of sounds to be measured: amplitude (intensity), fundamental frequency, spectral structure, and duration → loudness, pitch, sound quality, and length. Asking listeners to report on what they hear and understand. Phonetic Features ● Loudness: - Breadth/Amplitude of the vibration of the vocal folds (vocal cords) - The greater = louder Loudness ● ● ● https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics/mechani cal-waves-and-sound/sound-topic/v/sound-properties-a mplitude-period-frequency-wavelength Stress → distinguish meaning in suprasegmental features (prosody) (Phonetics) Not in segmental phonology of English accents → distinctive feature? Pitch ● ● ● ● frequency of the vibration of the vocal folds: faster = higher Suprasegmental level: can distinguish meaning (stress & intonation) English: cannot change the function of an individual sound within the sound system Vietnamese? Sound quality Sound quality vs. Tone of voice ● ● Sound quality: quality that is characterised by the distinctive features Tone of voice (voice quality,tonal quality, timbre): the difference in “colour” between two voices → a sound with exactly the same phonetic (including distinctive) features. E.g.: 2 musical instruments Duration & Length Duration & Length = Sound quantity → span of time sound sustained ● Duration (phonetics) → the absolute or actual time taken in the articulation E.g.: see → long/short → phonetic ● Length (phonology) → relative time a sound is sustained as perceived by the listener. E.g.: fool vs. full Airstream Mechanism Voicedness & Voicelessness ● The state of the glottis Phonetic similarities and differences? Phonology - Studies the systematic organization of sounds in a language. - Aim: establish distinctive differences between sounds, identify and describe the phonemes and the phonemic system of a language. - There are mainly two approaches, i.e., formally distributional approach and semantic method. - Distributional approach: analyzing the position/distribution of the sound in the word, - Semantic method on the meaning generated by the sounds. Phonological tools - - To facilitate the analyzing process, it is necessary to represent speech sounds on the page. → phonetic symbols (i.e., the IPA) The analysis is performed through the system of phonological 24 oppositions, - - A phoneme and an allophone Phonological rules (phonological process) Syllable structure Distinctive features Prosody: The suprasegmental features occur simultaneously with vowels and consonants but stretch 26 across larger units like syllables, words, or sentences Stress & intonation Similarities & Differences in Phonologies of Languages ←> ergonomics of the speech process - Distinctions: easy to preceive/produce E.g.: [t] [n] all languages: dental/alveolar [t] and [n], 64% [d] < 0.5% [ no] - Low-cost contrasts → consonants and vowels → universal & innate Similarities & Differences in Phonologies of Languages 1, Varying complexity - Number of segments E.g.: the smallest number 11 (e.g. Rotokas, spoken in Papua New Guinea) the largest 141 (!Xu ̃, spoken in Namibia and Angola) Similarities & Differences in Phonologies of Languages - Differences in constraints Blevins (1995): + + + + + the lowest degree of complexity in syllable structure: a single (short) vowel in the peak and optionally allow maximally one consonant in the onset → (C)V The Onset may be obligatory: CV. There may be a coda. The onset may be complex (allow 1 or 2 C in the onset) The peak may be complex, i.e. be VV. Similarities & Differences 2, Universals: - All languages have syllables, and all segment inventories can be split into consonants and vowels. All consonant inventories include voiceless plosives, i.e. all languages have at least two of the three consonants [p,t,k]. Unusual segments tend to occur in larger segment inventories. Unusual segments tend to be phonologically more complex than common segments. Similarities & Differences Implications: - A language will only have segment X if it already has segment Y. E.g.: a voiceless nasal - voiced counterpart, [z] - [s]. - One way in which languages construct their segment inventories is by adding elements to already existing segments. E.g.: [p,t,k] → ‘vibrating vocal cords’ → [ph, th, kh] - Maddieson (1984): the number of vowels and the number of consonants are positively correlated. Unusual segments tend to be less frequent in the languages that have them. Similarities & Differences - Plosives are more common than fricatives. Voiceless plosives are more common than voiced ones. Voiceless fricatives are more common than voiced fricatives. Front rounded and back unrounded vowels are less common than either front unrounded or back rounded vowels. CPA → Pronunciation problems • Phonemic asymmetries: will be the source of more fundamental distortions, often leading to unintelligibility • Allophonic differences: leads to “foreign accent” without much impairment of communication CPA - Functional loads of comparable phonological contrasts • Functional load refers to the relative importance of linguistic contrasts in a language. Eg: the majority of the consonants in English form a voiced/voiceless contrast → high functional load Practice!
