Languages I / Transcription and Connected Speech
Practice question · Sort into groups

Sort each transcription decision by whether it belongs to a BROAD or a NARROW transcription.

Groups: Broad · Narrow

Hints
  1. One kind records what the speaker intended, the other what came out.
  2. Anything predictable from a rule belongs to the narrow transcription.
Show the answer

Broad: Recording only the contrastive units, Using slant brackets, The style used in a dictionary

Narrow: Marking aspiration on a stressed-onset /p/, Marking a vowel as nasalised before a nasal, Using square brackets

Why

The dictionary item is the practical test: dictionaries use broad transcription because everything in the narrow column is predictable from the allophonic rules, so printing it would add length without adding information a reader could not derive.

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