LECTURE 2. THE PHONEME.

Issues of the lecture:

1) Definitions of the phoneme.

2) The notion of allophones and their classification.

3) Three aspects of the phoneme.

4) Main trends in phoneme theory:

A) The mentalistic or psychological view

B) The functional view

C) The abstract view

D) The physical view

E) The Cybernetic Approach to the Phoneme

5) Linguistic transcription.

Things to pay special attention:

Different levels of language units.

The smallest or shortest unit of language is the phoneme. The sequence of phonemes making units of higher ranks represents the phonemic level. One or several phonemes combined constitute a unit of a higher level, the second level – that of morphemes, or the morphemic level. One (or usually more than one) morpheme makes a word, a ‘lexeme’ – hence, the lexical level. One or usually more than one word makes an utterance, or, in traditional terminology, a sentence. Hence, it is the sentence level. Word combinations are best treated as not forming an independent level for two reasons:

1) functionally, they do not differ from words, because they name without communicating;

2) one word does not make a word combination, whereas one word can make an utterance: OUT! WHY? WINTER.

We could go on singling out paragraph level and even text level paying homage to the now fashionable text linguistics but for the fact that not every text is divided into paragraphs, although every paragraph or every text is divisible into sentences.

Each level consists of units of the neighboring lower level with nothing besides – a sentence consists only of words; a word is divided into morphemes or sometimes coincides with one; a morpheme contains nothing but phonemes or is represented by one of them, as in make-s, read –er, pen –s.

Summing up, we must say that the first meaning of the word level suggests the idea of horizontal layers (subdivisions) of some structure. And, language presents a hierarchy of level, from the lowest up to the highest.

Segments and Phones

A phonetic alphabet represents speech in the form of segments, or individual speech sounds like [p], [s], or [m]. This may seem to be a natural thing to do, but anyone who hears a new language for the first time finds it hard to break up the flow of speech into individual sounds that make up words. Even when we hear our own language spoken, we do not focus our attention on individual sounds as much as we do on the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences. Still, all speakers of a language can identify the sounds of their language. Linguistic knowledge makes it possible to break down a stream of speech into its component parts, one of which is sound segments or phones, or sound features. So, we can conclude that the term phone or segment means a single speech sound.

By complimentary distributionis meant the fact, that the difference in articulation of a sound is based on certain phonetic environments, like voiced and voiceless [l] vary systematically in that all of the voiceless [l] occur predictably after the class of voiceless stops [p, t, k]. Since no voiced [l] ever occurs in the same phonetic environment as a voiceless one (and vice versa).

Allophonic variation is found throughout language. In fact, every speech sound we utter is an allophone of some phonemes and can be grouped together with other phonetically similar sounds into a class that is represented by a phoneme on a phonological level of representation. An important part of phonological analysis deals with discovering the phonemes of languages and accounting for allophonic variation.

As you have probably noticed, the terms segment, phoneand allophone are used by linguists interchangeably and, in fact, are synonyms.

Phoneme

This is the fundamental unit of phonology, which has been defined and used in many different ways during this century. Virtually all theories of phonology hold that spoken language can be broken down into a string of sound units (phonemes), and that each language has a small, relatively fixed set of these phonemes. Most phonemes can be put into groups; for example, in English we can identify a group of plosive phonemes [p t k b d g], a group of voiceless fricatives [f θ s ʃ h] and so on. An important question in phoneme theory is how the analyst can establish what the phonemes of a language are. The most widely accepted view is that phonemes are contrastive and one must find cases where the difference between two words is dependent on the difference between two phonemes: for example, we can prove that the difference between 'pin' and 'pan' depends on the vowel, and that /ɪ/ and /æ/ are different phonemes. Pairs of words that differ in just one phoneme are known as minimal pairs. We can establish the same fact about /p/ and /b/ by citing 'pin' and 'bin'. Of course, you can only start doing commutation tests like this when you have a provisional list of possible phonemes to test, so some basic phonetic analysis must precede this stage. Other fundamental concepts used in phonemic analysis of this sort are complementary distribution, free variation, distinctive feature and allophone.Different analyses of a language are possible: in the case of English some phonologists claim that there are only six vowel phonemes, others that there are twenty or more (it depends on whether you count diphthongs and long vowels as single phonemes or as combinations of two phonemes). It used to be said that learning the pronunciation of a language depended on learning the individual phonemes of the language, but this "building-block" view of pronunciation is looked on nowadays as an unhelpful oversimplification.

Metrical phonology

This is a comparatively recent development in phonological theory, and is one of the approaches often described as "non-linear". It can be seen as a reaction against the overriding importance given to the phonemic segment in most earlier theories of phonology. In metrical phonology great importance is given to larger units and their relative strength and weakness; there is, for example, considerable interest in the structure of the syllable itself and in the patterns of strong and weak that one finds among neighboring syllables and among the words to which the syllables belong. Another area of major interest is the rhythmical nature of speech and the structure of the foot: metrical phonology attempts to explain why shifts in word stress occur as a result of context, giving alternations like

thir'teen but 'thirteenth 'place

com'pact but 'compact 'disc

The metrical structure of an utterance is usually diagrammed in the form of a tree diagram (metrical trees), though for the purposes of explaining the different levels of stress found in an utterance more compact "metrical grids" can be constructed. This approach can be criticized for constructing very elaborate hypotheses with little empirical evidence, and for relying exclusively on a binary relationship between elements where all polysyllabic sequences can be reduced to pairs of items of which one is strong and the other is weak.

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Literature:

1) Васильев В.А. Фонетика английского языка. Теоретический курс. - М: «Высшая школа», 1969.- С. 140-170.

2) Соколова М.А., Гинтовт К.П., Кантер Л.А., Крылова Н.И. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка: Учеб.для студ.высш.уч.заведений. –М.:Гуманит.изд.центр ВЛАДОС, 2004.- с.47-51.

3) Дикушина О.И. Фонетика английского языка. Теоретический курс. – М.: Просвещение, 1965. – С.26-43.

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