Methods of phonological analysis. The aim of the phonological analysis is, firstly, to determine which differences of sounds are phonemic and which are non-phonemic and

The aim of the phonological analysis is, firstly, to determine which differences of sounds are phonemic and which are non-phonemic and, secondly, to find the inventory of phonemes of the language.

SEMANTIC METHOD is based on a phonemic rule that phonemes can distinguish words and morphemes when opposed to one another. This method consists:

1) In finding minimal pairs of words and their grammatical forms. By minimal pair we mean a pair of words or morphemes which are differentiated by only one phoneme in the same position. For ex: cat-bat.

2) in systematic substitution (замена) of one sound for another in order to find out in which cases the phonetic context remains the same, such replacing leads to a change of meaning.

a) the pronunciation of a different word form

b) the pronunciation of a meaningless sequence of sounds

c) a different repetition variant pronunciation of the same word or form.

DISTRIBUTIONAL METHOD

Two Laws of phonemic and allophonic distribution.

1) allophones of different phonemes always occur in the same phonemic context

2) allophones of the same phoneme never occur in the same phonemic context and always occur in different positions.

If more or less different speech sounds occur on the same phonetic context, they should be allophones of different phonemes.
There are three types of distribution: contrastive, complementary and free variation.

We should remind you here that the features of a phoneme that are capable of differentiating the meaning are termed as relevant or distinctive. The features that do not take part in differentiating the meaning are termed as irrelevant or non-distinctive. The latter may be of two kinds:

a) incidental or redundant features, for example, aspiration of voiceless plosives, presence of voice in voiced consonants, length of vowels:

b) indispensable or concomitant features, for example, tenseness of English long monophtongs, the checked character of stressed short vowels, lip rounding of back vowels.

It is well to remember that a single opposition remains single if it members differ from each other irrelevant both incidental and concomitant features.