Meaning is a red herring
Feb. 16th, 2012 01:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomLing 1 pet peeve time!
Introductory linguistics textbooks typically define phonemes, or minimal pairs, or contrastive distribution, somehow in terms of "meaning". A typical example from Language Files (Bergmann et al. 2007): "We say that these two sounds are noncontrastive in English, since interchanging the two does not result in a change of meaning. In Hindi, on the other hand, [p] and [ph] are contrastive, since replacing one sound with the other in a word can change the word's meaning."
This is extremely irritating!
What matters isn't whether changing a sound changes the word's meaning; what matters is whether it whether it changes the word's identity—i.e., whether it changes it into a different word. These are not equivalent! (E.g., sled and sledge are arguably different words with the same meaning that differ in one phoneme—the White Witch takes Edmund for a ride on her sledge. Changing /d/ to /dʒ/ therefore changes the identity of the word but not the meaning.)
In practice, for immediate purposes, this isn't a big deal, since in general it leads students to the right conclusions about which segments are different phonemes and which aren't, which is what the point of that definition is when it's introduced. But it leads students to sloppy habits of thinking that what you're doing when you change a phoneme is changing the meaning of a word, rather than changing it into a different word. This can lead, for instance, to students learning that tone is phonemic in Mandarin and then believing something like "The Mandarin word ma can have four different meanings depending on what tone you pronounce it with," rather than "Mandarin has four different words whose segmental content is ma which differ in their phonological tone." (For comparison: "The Mandarin word ma..." is about as incoherent as "The English word b_t can have twelve different meanings depending on what vowel you pronounce it with." There's no sense in which we're talking about one word with multiple meanings here.)
This habit of thinking that features which aren't used in English somehow don't count as creating "different words" is hard enough to train people out of already; we don't need the phonemes-change-meaning red herring contributing to it as well.
Introductory linguistics textbooks typically define phonemes, or minimal pairs, or contrastive distribution, somehow in terms of "meaning". A typical example from Language Files (Bergmann et al. 2007): "We say that these two sounds are noncontrastive in English, since interchanging the two does not result in a change of meaning. In Hindi, on the other hand, [p] and [ph] are contrastive, since replacing one sound with the other in a word can change the word's meaning."
This is extremely irritating!
What matters isn't whether changing a sound changes the word's meaning; what matters is whether it whether it changes the word's identity—i.e., whether it changes it into a different word. These are not equivalent! (E.g., sled and sledge are arguably different words with the same meaning that differ in one phoneme—the White Witch takes Edmund for a ride on her sledge. Changing /d/ to /dʒ/ therefore changes the identity of the word but not the meaning.)
In practice, for immediate purposes, this isn't a big deal, since in general it leads students to the right conclusions about which segments are different phonemes and which aren't, which is what the point of that definition is when it's introduced. But it leads students to sloppy habits of thinking that what you're doing when you change a phoneme is changing the meaning of a word, rather than changing it into a different word. This can lead, for instance, to students learning that tone is phonemic in Mandarin and then believing something like "The Mandarin word ma can have four different meanings depending on what tone you pronounce it with," rather than "Mandarin has four different words whose segmental content is ma which differ in their phonological tone." (For comparison: "The Mandarin word ma..." is about as incoherent as "The English word b_t can have twelve different meanings depending on what vowel you pronounce it with." There's no sense in which we're talking about one word with multiple meanings here.)
This habit of thinking that features which aren't used in English somehow don't count as creating "different words" is hard enough to train people out of already; we don't need the phonemes-change-meaning red herring contributing to it as well.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-16 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-16 11:44 pm (UTC)i still feel like we ought to have some kind of data we can bring to bear to justify these very theory-laden intuitions about word identity (i share the intuitions, but i don't know how much that should count for).