I have been too busy to do much on this blog for the past year, but I'm hoping to revive it in the coming months. Keep your fingers crossed.
Today's post concerns four seemingly basic categories of relationships between words that can be rather confusing for first-year students of English Studies, let alone learners with no background in linguistics. Today's post will be followed by one with exercises.
1. Homonyms are words which are spelt and pronounced the same and which have different, unrelated meanings. They may have very different etymological origins or they may be traced back to the same word, but in this case their connection is no longer relevant to modern-day speakers, who may just as well be unaware of it. The most popular example is that of the words bank, meaning: 1) the edge of a river, 2) a financial institution.
2. Homographs are two words that are spelt the same but pronounced differently and usually have unrelated meanings, e.g. you can sow /səʊ/ seeds in a field or a flowerpot, but a female pig is called a sow /saʊ/, with two different diphthong phonemes despite the same spelling. The spelling <ow> is often pronounced in the two ways given above. Interestingly, sometimes two grammatical forms of a word have different pronunciations despite having the same spelling: the infinitive and present tense of read is pronounced /riːd/, whereas the past form read is pronounced /red/.
3. Homophones are the opposites of homographs in that they are pronounced the same despite different spelling. The negative particle no and the verb know are pronounced the same, i.e. /nəʊ/, as are the letter name C, the verb see and the noun sea /siː/. Owing to the complex history of English spelling homophones as well as homographs abound, particularly one-syllable words.
4. If two words, regardless of their spelling, are pronounced with just one phonemic difference between them, they are a minimal pair. Not particularly significant in more theoretical phonological studies, minimal pairs are of paramount importance in pronunciation teaching and speech therapy: exercises based on minimal pairs allow teachers and therapists to study phonemic hearing skills (can a student/patient perceive the difference between two or more distinct sounds?) and production skills (can they pronounce the sounds in question differently?).
For practical purposes it makes sense to present minimal pairs where the sounds in question are similar and thus likely to be confused. Contrasting thin and fin (voiceless dental/labio-dental fricatives) or bet and bat (short front monophthong vowels) is more justified than contrasting the vowels of bat and boot or the initial consonants of what and shot.
Sometimes two words which are spelt similarly but one of them is one sound longer than the other are also called minimal pairs. One example pair is thing /θɪŋ/and think /θɪŋk/: here despite similar spelling the former word contains just one velar consonant at the end while the latter contains two, a voiced nasal and a voiceless plosive/stop.
In some cases it is possible to produce a long minimal set (of more than two items). Consider these examples: 1) pat-bat-mat-fat-vat-that-tat-lat-gnat-chat-rat-cat-hat (C + /æt/)
2) bit-beat-bet-bat-but-Bart-bot-bought-boot-Bert-bait-bite-boat-bout (/b/ + V + /t/)
5. It is worth noting that different accents of English have different homographs and homophones. In non-rhotic accents like RP, the words caught and court are pronounced the same, i.e. /kɔːt/, while in rhotic ones like GA, court naturally contains an /r/ sound. Likewise, the words ant and aunt are pronounced the same as /ænt/ in accents without the TRAP-BATH split, e.g. GA, while in accents with the split, including RP, the word aunt is pronounced /ɑːnt/. Changes occur over time as well: in modern-day RP speakers do not pronounce /ʊə/ in pour, hence pour and pore are homophones (/pɔː/). The disappearance of a voiceless [ʍ] as a phoneme marked as <wh> in spelling also means that which and witch, whales and Wales have become homophones in RP and many other accents (/w/ in both rather than /ʍ/ as opposed to /w/).
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