Phonetics and you can find every thing in the slide - Essay Example

The fact that there is evidence of both a voiced /ɣ/and voiceless /x/ velar fricative occurring in the same environments anticipates they are phonemes, and that a voiced counterpart to the labio-dental /f/ and alveolar fricative /s/ would also be found with further data. Evidence also suggests that although the voiced and voiceless pairs of velar fricative phonemes exist they are not found in all situations; for example, /x/ and /ɣ/ occur directly before the back mid vowel /o/ and the low vowel /a/ but not before the high /i/ and mid /e/front vowels and are thus in complementary distribution, wherein we find a voiceless alveolar fricative [ʃ] or its voiced counterpart [ʒ].

It is likely therefore, that the voiceless velar fricative /x/ becomes alveolar [ʃ] before front vowels /i/ and /e/, while its voiced partner /ɣ/ also becomes alveolar [ʒ] in the same situation, both of which therefore are allophones not phonemes. Within the dataset provided it could be predicted that [m] is an allophone of /n/ because [m] only occurs word initially and /n/ only occurs between vowels, but because of symmetry it is more likely they both occur as phonemes – within this same argument there may be a velar nasal /ŋ/.

Another allophone evidenced in the data is the alveolar trill [r] which is only found inter-vocalically preceding two vowels - in other words a diphthong. It can thus be assumed that the flap or tap /ɾ/ becomes a trill [r] before a diphthong. The difficulty in terms of interpretation in this data set is whether the post alveolar affricate [tʃ] is a phoneme or an allophone; for want of further evidence and because both the voiced and voiceless post alveolar fricatives occur in the same environment as the post alveolar affricate it is suggested that it is an allophone of /k/ in keeping with the symmetrical pattern of each velar phoneme having allophones preceding front