In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones represent two separate phonemes in the language. Many phonologists in the middle part of the 20th century had a strong interest in developing techniques for discovering the phonemes of unknown languages, and in some cases, they set up writing systems for the languages. The major work of Kenneth Pike on the subject is Phonemics: a technique for reducing languages to writing. The minimal pair was an essential tool in the discovery process and was found by substitution or commutation tests. As an example for English vowels, the pair "let" + "lit" can be used to demonstrate that the phones [ɛ] (in let) and [ɪ] (in lit) actually represent distinct phonemes /ɛ/ and /ɪ/. An example for English consonants is the minimal pair of "pat" + "bat". The following table shows other pairs demonstrating the existence of various distinct phonemes in English. All of the possible minimal pairs for any language may be set out in the same way.
Phonemic differentiation may vary between different dialects of a language so a particular minimal pair in one accent may be a pair of homophones in another. That means not that one of the phonemes is absent in the homonym accent but only that it is not contrastive in the same range of contexts; for example in accents with strong /æ/-raising, bag /bæg/ and beg /bɛg/ may merge (often into "bayg" /beɪg/), but the apple, kettle, and gate vowels remain generally unmerged.
Types In addition to the minimal pairs of vowels and consonants provided above, others may be found:
Quantity Many languages show contrasts between long and short vowels and consonants. A distinctive difference in length is attributed by some phonologists to a unit called a chroneme. Thus, Italian has the following minimal pair that is based on long and short /l/:
However, in such a case it is not easy to decide whether a long vowel or consonant should be treated as having an added chroneme or simply as a geminate sound with phonemes. Classical Latin, German, some Italian dialects, almost all Uralic languages, Thai, and many other languages also have distinctive length in vowels. An example is the cŭ/cū minimal pair in the Italian dialect that is spoken near Palmi (Calabria, Italy):
Syntactic gemination In some languages like Italian, word-initial consonants are geminated after certain vowel-final words in the same prosodic unit. Sometimes, the phenomenon can create some syntactic-gemination-minimal-pairs:
In the example, the graphical accent on dà is just a diacritical mark that does not change the pronunciation of the word itself. However, in some specific areas, like Tuscany, both phrases are pronounced /daˈkkaːza/ and so can be distinguished only from the context.
Tone Minimal pairs for tone contrasts in tone languages can be established; some writers refer to that as a contrast involving a toneme. For example, Kono, of Sierra Leone, distinguishes high tone and low tone on syllables:
Stress Languages in which stress may occur in different positions within the word often have contrasts that can be shown in minimal pairs, as in Greek and Spanish:
In English stress can determine the part of speech of a word: insult as a noun is /ˈɪnsʌlt/ while as a verb it is /ɪnˈsʌlt/. In certain cases it can also differentiate two words: below /bɪˈloʊ/ vs billow /ˈbɪloʊ/.
Juncture Anglophones can distinguish between, for example, "great ape" and "grey tape", but phonemically, the two phrases are identical: /ɡreɪteɪp/. The difference between the two phrases, which constitute a minimal pair, is said to be one of juncture. At the word boundary, a "plus juncture" /+/ has been posited and said to be the factor conditioning allophones to allow distinctivity: in this example, the phrase "great ape" has an /eɪ/ diphthong shortened by pre-fortis clipping and, since it is not syllable-initial, a /t/ with little aspiration (variously [t˭], [ɾ], [ʔt], [ʔ], etc., depending on dialect); meanwhile in "grey tape", the /eɪ/ has its full length and the /t/ is aspirated [tʰ]. Only languages with allophonic differences associated with grammatical boundaries may have juncture as a phonological element. There is disagreement over whether or not French has phonological juncture: it seems likely that the difference between, for example, "des petits trous" (some little holes) and "des petites roues" (some little wheels), phonemically both /depətitʁu/, is only perceptible in slow, careful speech.
Minimal sets The principle of a simple binary opposition between the two members of a minimal pair may be extended to cover a minimal set in which a number of words differ from one another in terms of one phone in a particular position in the word. For example, the vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ of Swahili are shown to be distinct by the following set of words: pata 'hinge', peta 'bend', pita 'pass', pota 'twist', puta 'thrash'. However, establishing such sets is not always straightforward and may require very complex study of multiple oppositions as expounded by, for example, Nikolai Trubetzkoy.
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