Implicational Laws

Implicational Laws

1. Are observations about more common and less common speech sounds

   • Frequency & Distribution
     • It is related to the degree to which sounds will be used in a particular language and to the range of distribution of sounds in the words of the language. An example in English of the limited use and limited distribution of less common sounds is the phoneme [ð].
       • Reasons why some sounds are more common than others. -Some sounds are more common than others because people use only language to communicate and they do so more and more easily, using more common sounds that are easier to understand and reproduce.
     • Sound Inventories
       • It tells us that if a language uses a less common sound, one of its more common will also be included in that language's inventory of contrastive sounds. Example: Less Common [ð] [s] [x] More Common [d] [t] [k].
   • Acquisition of Sounds
     • It is the type of observation related to the most common sounds and less common has to do with the order of their acquisition. For example: children who have not yet mastered the full inventory of sounds and say [dɪs wᴧn] for it, they are replacing the relatively less common [ð] with [d], that is more common.
       • -Also because by restricting the inventory of sounds to certain more common sounds and restricting the degree of use and distribution of the less common sounds in languages that use them, the use of the more common sounds is employed before the less common ones. -Less common sounds tend to be forgotten and replaced.
     • Sound Change
       • Type of observation involving language change. So less common sounds tend to be less stable than more common ones. For example: Old English of the word knight, there was a fricative velar [x] between the vowel and the [t]. but during the development of English, this velar fricative was lost (so knight now rhymes with quite).
         • The four aspects do not differ much, because basically the four concepts tell us about the same observations ,the less common and the more common speech sounds, the less common are forgotten and replaced by the more common that are easier to understand and produce. -A clear example about replacing sounds is when children are unlikely to master sounds that are difficult to produce (such as fricatives, which require delicate muscle control to produce) because there are at least some cases where the observation that sound X is more common than sound Y is directly related to the fact that sound X is easier to produce than sound Y. Thus , [k] is more common than [ x] because stops are easier to produce than fricatives. Alveolar fricatives are more common than pharyngeal fricatives because the tip of the tongue is more agile than the back of the tongue; therefore alveolar consonants are easier to produce than pharyngeal ones.

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