ABSTRACT
Phonetically motivated sound change in which a complex segment is split into two simple segments, e.g. medial gemination in the OHG *Old High German consonant shift: essen ‘eat,’ or Eng. cop-per (loan from Lat. cuprum) as well as Eng. ham-mer<OE ha-mor. The original affricate [ts] is bisegmentalized to /t+s/, and thereby assigned to different syllables; the assimilation of the stop to the following fricative [ts]>[ss] yields the gemination. ( also articulatory phonetics)
Reference
phonology
The simplest type of ambiguity. A word is bisemic, if it has two meanings which are frequently, though not necessarily, opposed to each other, e.g. Fr. sacré: ‘holy’ and ‘damned.’ ( also homonymy, polysemy)
Contraction of ‘binary digit,’ the smallest unit of measure for the informational content of binary decisions. Every unit contains one bit of information since it is equivalent to a single yes/no-decision ( binary opposition). Thus, in the case of a coin, there are two
The information about which side of a die is up requires three bits since . ( also information theory)
A term coined by Chomsky in 1964. Biuniqueness is a principle associated with the socalled taxonomic structuralism by which a one-to-one relationship exists between phonetic and phonemic representations in a phonological analysis. That is, if two words are pronounced identically, then they are phonologically equivalent. This ensures that one and the same phone is not assigned to different phonemes as in paws and pause. ( also distributionalism)
References
Chomsky, N. 1964. Current issues in linguistic theory. The Hague. phonology
A metaphorical term for the investigation of systems in which only the input and output can be observed. The inner structure of the data and their relationships to each other cannot be observed; so the properties of the structure in the ‘box’ are inferred from the input and output data. This view, taken from cybernetics ( information theory), is in keeping with the investigation of natural languages, whereby the system of grammatical rules can be equated with the internal structure of linguistic production. This is similar to the ‘black box’ of the human brain, whose neurophysiological processes during speech are not accessible to empirical observation and can only be hypothesized. ( also transformational grammar)
