Dissimilation
Dissimilation is a phonological process in which a sound becomes less similar to a neighboring sound. This can occur within a word or across word boundaries. The purpose of dissimilation is to make speech production easier by reducing the similarity between adjacent sounds.
5 Key excerpts on "Dissimilation"
eBook - ePub- Robert McColl Millar, R L Trask(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...For example, the type of anticipatory vowel assimilation shown in the example of German Gast/Gäste above is very important in the Germanic languages, and it is called umlaut by specialists in Germanic. As far as possible, I’ll try to avoid using such additional terms. The opposite of assimilation is Dissimilation : making sounds more different than they were before. Given what I have said about the naturalness of assimilation, you might wonder why Dissimilation should ever occur at all. The explanation lies in what we might call the ‘tongue-twister effect’. One reason why a tongue-twister is hard to say is that our speech organs can get weary of making the same sound (or very similar sounds) repeatedly. This effect occasionally shows up in ordinary speech. For example, the Latin word arbor ‘tree’ has become árbol in Spanish (another modern form of Latin), in which the second of the two occurrences of [r] has been dissimilated to an [1]. On the other hand, Italian colonello ‘colonel’ appears in Spanish as coronelo : this time the first of the two occurrences of [1] has been dissimilated to [r]. (Note that English, bizarrely (but perhaps typically), uses the Italian-type spelling but the Spanish-type pronunciation.) This kind of phenomenon regularly crosses greater linguistic barriers. For instance, the ancestor of Modern German Herberge, ‘hostelry’, most readily known by most of us through Jugendherberge ‘Youth Hostel’, was borrowed into a number of Romance languages as a word for ‘inn’. In Italian, for instance, the word occurs as Albergo. It would, I imagine, need an historical linguist to see the connection. Like all the Romance languages, Italian has gone through periods where [h] has been lost entirely; unlike some of its sisters, however, [h] has not ‘returned’ through borrowing or internal sound development. We can also see that the initial [r] has been altered to [l], while the second has been maintained, possibly as a form of Dissimilation...
eBook - ePubForeign Accent
The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Second Language Phonology
- Roy C. Major(Author)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Loan phonology is often considered a prime example of transfer. Interest in this widespread phenomenon has reappeared (for example, Yip, 1996). Van Coetsem (1988) devoted a whole volume to this topic by discussing what he calls “the” two types of transfer: borrowing and imposition. Borrowing occurs if the agent is the recipient language, for example, a Japanese speaker using English words when speaking Japanese; imposition occurs if the agent is the source language, for example, a Japanese speaker having a Japanese accent when speaking English. These and other studies on transfer bring home the fact that our NL has an inescapable influence on our L2. In other words, the formative years of our language lives permanently affect the rest of our language lives. 2.2 SIMILARITY AND DISSIMILARITY BETWEEN THE FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE The moderate version of CA, which claims similar phenomena are harder to learn than dissimilar phenomena, has fostered a widespread research agenda in L2 phonology, more than for other linguistic levels. Perhaps part of the reason is that in phonology, the notions of similar and dissimilar are easier to define than at other levels, particularly in semantics and discourse. With acoustic, articulatory, perceptual, and structural descriptions there are many clear-cut cases for classifying sounds as similar or dissimilar. (There are problematic cases that I discuss later.) For example, on the basis of phonetic space (formant measurements), who would argue with the claim that French /ε/ is more similar to English /ε/ than it is to /æ/? On the basis of a structuralist description, that is, looking at the phoneme inventory of German and French, it is clear that French /p/ is more similar to German /p/ than it is to German /b/ (as both languages have a series of voiceless and voiced stops), even though phonetic details show that in word initial position German /b/ can actually be a devoiced stop (i.e., more like [p])...
eBook - ePub- Mehmet Yavas(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...With the phoneme symbols, we give a minimal pair to show the contrast. On the other side, the single phoneme of the language is placed. Underneath the display, we have more explicit statements regarding the phonetic similarity of the sounds (suspicious pair), and the type of process for the contextual variants (allophones) that are in complementary distribution. The processes that are responsible for the contextual variants are almost always assimilation processes. Simply defined, assimilation refers to the influence that one sound may have on another when they are contiguous in time. To exemplify this, let us look at the Korean triplet [s, z, ʃ] we discussed earlier. We saw that /s/ was realized phonetically as [ʃ] before /i/. The change shown here is that a voiceless alveolar fricative becomes a voiceless palato‐alveolar fricative. If we think about the area that is relevant for the articulation of [i], we realize that it corresponds to the same area where palato‐alveolars are made. In other words, the influence of [i] as a conditioning environment for [ʃ] is, phonetically, very plausible, and indeed not infrequent in languages. Since in this case, the conditioning sound, [i], is after the conditioned sound, the process is said to be an example of a regressive assimilation (the following sound influences the preceding sound; called anticipatory coarticulation in some books). If the influence comes from the preceding sound on to the following sound, it is termed a progressive assimilation. The other allophone of the Korean /s/ was [z], and the context it appeared in was always after a nasal. In other words, the voicing of the nasal seems to be the culprit in this change from a voiceless alveolar fricative to a voiced alveolar fricative...
eBook - ePubLinguistics for Language Teachers
Lessons for Classroom Practice
- Sunny Park-Johnson, Sarah J. Shin(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Quite simply, assimilation causes a sound to become more like a neighboring sound in terms of one or more of its phonetic characteristics. Assimilation occurs mainly for ease of articulation; that is, assimilation makes it easier to move the articulators to produce different sounds consecutively in fluent speech. In Table 3.2, we saw that [r], a typically voiced sound, became voiceless after voiceless consonants, [k] and [f], in fast speech. This process is called devoicing. Liquids and glides after voiceless consonants in English words such as play [pl̥ɛɪ], prod [pr̥ad], and cure [kj̥ur] are often devoiced. Devoicing is a kind of assimilation because the lack of voicing in the [p] and [k] sounds spreads to [l], [r], and [j], making these normally voiced sounds voiceless. Speaking in terms of articulatory phonetics, devoicing happens because the vocal folds do not start vibrating immediately after the release of the voiceless consonant closure. Table 3.3 [m] and [θ] Described in Terms of Voicing, Place, and Manner Voicing Place Manner [m] Voiced Bilabial Nasal [θ] Voiceless Interdental Fricative Table 3.4 [m], [p], and [θ] Described in Terms of Voicing, Place, and Manner Voicing Place Manner [m] Voiced Bilabial Nasal [p] Voiceless Bilabial Stop [θ] Voiceless Interdental Fricative Voices From the Classroom 3.2—Teaching the Different Pronunciations of the -ed Ending When teaching past tense, I use phonology to teach the different pronunciations of the -ed ending. For this lesson, I explain the difference between voiced and voiceless sounds, asking students to touch their throats as we go through different sounds together so they can feel their vocal cords vibrating or not. Then, in groups, they receive a stack of cards, each with three words with -ed on them (for example, one card might have asked, filled, and wanted). Together, students decide on the pronunciation for each word, label the words with /t/, /d/, or /ɪd/, and practice saying them...
eBook - ePub- John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, Alan C. L. Yu, John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, Alan C. L. Yu(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...The most obvious instance of hypercorrective change is Dissimilation. For example, when a phonemically labialized consonant is adjacent to a rounded vowel, a listener may attribute the labialization on the consonant to coarticulatory influence from the adjacent vowel, and interpret it as a (phonologically) non-labialized consonant. A well-known case is Classical Greek (/lukos/ < * /luk w os/ ‘wolf’,/kuklos/ < * /k w uk w los/ ‘wheel’); the deletion of postconsonantal/w/ before rounded vowels in English has a similar explanation (sword /so d/ < /swo d/, two /tu/ < /two /). A notable aspect of this theory of Dissimilation and other hypercorrective sound changes is that they are predicted to be structure-preserving (Ohala 1993; Kiparsky 1995; though see Blevins and Garrett 1998: 519-520 for arguments against this position). In order for it to be possible for a listener to (mis)interpret an instance of [A] as being [B]+coarticulation, a [B] must already exist independently in the system. 1 Two points about Ohala’s listener-based theory are worth making here. Firstly, it should be emphasized that Ohala’s explanations pertain, strictly speaking, only to the initiation (actuation) phase of sound changes. The misperception events on which the theory rests, and which have been successfully replicated in the laboratory in a variety of experiments, take place in a particular listener’s perception of a particular utterance during some particular communicative event. The theory has nothing specific to say about how such a “mini sound change” (Ohala 1993) takes hold and spreads throughout a community. Nor does it account for how the effects of this “mini sound change” come to be manifested across the entire lexicon rather than just in the one word in question...
