Analyzing Sound Patterns An Introduction to Phonology

Introduction

We continue to explore distribution in this chapter. As a type of phonological phenomenon, distribution displays co-occurrence restrictions. By co-occurrence restrictions, we refer to constraints imposed on the ability of two or more entities to appear together. With respect to distribution in phonology, these entities can refer to sounds (vowels and consonants), stress, tone, and structural positions such as word-initial, word-final, or syllable positions such as onset, nuclei, and coda, etc. Languages limit the ability of certain sounds to co-occur or appear in such positions as those in a word or syllable. In the units on tone and stress to be presented later, we show that stress and tone are subject to distributional restrictions as well. For instance, a high tone might not co-occur with another high tone in some languages. In others, all syllables containing a long vowel or ending in a vowel–consonant sequence must be stressed. These phenomena have in common restrictions on the co-occurrence of two or more entities, resulting in gaps in the distribution. Gaps in distributions stem from the fact that not all logical possibilities are attested.

This chapter examines a case of distribution involving English nasals. Those of you who are familiar with English believe that English has three nasal sounds. One is the bilabial m, which appears as the first and last sound in ‘mat’ or ‘damn.’ The second is the alveolar n, as in ‘nap’ or ‘tan’. The third nasal is the ng sound, which is the last sound in ‘long’ or ‘strong.’ Linguists use the symbol ŋ to represent the ng sound, a sound linguists call engma. Unlike m and n, engma is a velar sound, articulated by raising the back of the tongue toward the velar region. We see shortly that these three nasal sounds are not equal in their distribution. One of them is restricted to a specific position in a word. Moreover, all three nasals are subject to restrictions when they appear as part of a consonant cluster.