Introduction to Russian phonology and word structure Ch 12: Phonemics, concluded

Discussion 8. The unbearable lightness of phonemes… Well, actually there has been a lot of work on phonological theories. If there is interest and expertise, we could talk a bit about the role of phonemes in these theories…

Discussion 9. This isn’t the only possible version of Russian phonemics. We could put assimilations and reductions in there too… How are high and deep related here?

Discussion 9. This isn’t the only possible version of Russian phonemics. We could put assimilations and reductions in there too… How are high and deep related here? Note surface vs. deep X high-level vs. low-level

Discussion 10. What is neutralization?

Discussion 10. What is neutralization? Neutralization is what happens in an environment where only one of a set of variants (such as allophones or phonemes) can occur Eg voicing is neutralized in final position

Let me tell you a story… 11. Here is the story about Polish… Let’s look at the handout together…

Too “surfacy”? 12. Why do you think I feel this way about Hamilton’s phonemes? Notice that he admits to it in the heading on page 100…

More discussion 13. It would be nice to have an operational definition for a phoneme, but unfortunately distribution (which is our best metric) runs into problems with homonymy and complementarily distributed sounds, and also things like Russian щ... Why are there problems with these things and what practical measures can we take?

More discussion, cont’d. Homonymy: Well, if having a different meaning implies that you have different phonemes, we are in trouble when we look at homonyms, such as: жать ‘press’ vs. жать ‘reap’ and рас ‘races Gpl’ vs. раз ‘time(s)’ Complementary distribution has to make some sense, we have to assume that there is some connection among the allophones of a phoneme, don’t we? Finally щ: again, we have to be practical…

And more fun with transcription… 14. Let’s do the phonemic transcriptions for pp. 72-73 together…