GATE Humanities and Social Sciences - Linguistics Practice Quiz

Question 1

In English, the aspirated [pʰ] in 'pin' and the unaspirated [p] in 'spin' are best analyzed as

Accepted Answer

allophones of the same phoneme /p/ conditioned by position

Question 2

A student claims: 'If two sounds are articulatorily very different, they cannot be allophones of the same phoneme.' Which evaluation is best?

Accepted Answer

The claim is generally too strong; although phonetic similarity matters, distributional and systemic evidence can still motivate allophonic analysis

Question 3

Suppose in a language [t] and [d] occur in exactly the same phonetic environments, and replacing one with the other can change word meaning. This implies that [t] and [d] are

Accepted Answer

separate phonemes

Question 4

A linguist finds that [s] appears before vowels and [ʃ] before high front vowels only, with no exceptions and no minimal pairs. Which conclusion is most justified?

Accepted Answer

[ʃ] is an allophone of /s/ conditioned by the following vowel

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