LingLunch : Peggy renwick

Peggy Renwick
Dimensions of Phonemic Contrast in Romance Vowels

The classical view of phonemic structure relies on minimal pairs to distinguish between contrastive sounds in a language; for example, the fact that Italian birra ‘beer’ and barra ‘plank’ have different meanings is taken as sufficient evidence that /i/ and /a/ are separate phonemes in the Italian vowel inventory. In this talk, I argue that the contrastiveness of a sound depends on a range of factors, including relative frequency, functional load, acoustic distinctness, perceptibility, and independence from phonological conditioning, in addition to minimal pairs. These are combined in a multidimensional model, in which phonemic robustness may increase or decrease relative to other sounds in the system, or across different contexts. Such a view enriches the notion of contrast by acknowledging the diverse streams of information that speakers and hearers use to encode and decode speech. Evidence is drawn from case studies on the production, perception, and history of vowels in Romanian and Italian.