Re: [tied] The minimal-pair test

----- Original Message -----

From: Harald Hammarstrom

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 3:20 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Retroflexes in Sanskrit

> Forgive me for asking but is there a requirement in the minimal pair tests that both pair words be "in the language"?

 

Essentially, yes, at least in the pure form of the method, because the test is then independent of any individual speaker's subjective opinion. In your example, some speakers might (hypothetically) object to [gæZ] as un-English by pointing out that there is no English word to rhyme with it, and that final [Z] seems to require a long vowel or diphthong (at least in RP). Others might disagree, since [æZ] may occur in a medial context (as in <casual> and <azure>).

 

> For example for /N/ and /Z/, any english speaker will tell you that 'gang' /gaN/ is a different word from 'gazh' /gaZ/ even though gazh isn't a word in English. Any english speaker would also say that for instance 'gang' with say an uvular N instead of velar, would simply be a funky pronounciation of gang, regardless of the existence of a word gang with uvular N in English.

 

In practice, linguists often resort to "near-minimal" pairs, where the words differ in more than one segment, but the immediate environment of the phones being contrasted is identical (we don't normally expect allophonic conditioning to operate at a distance, except in some special cases such as umlaut). Thus, <hanger> and <azure> should in principle do, since the presence or absence of an initial [h] is not known to have any effect on medial consonants in English, and the crucial environment is the æ_&(r)# part.

 

Piotr