SEMINAR 3. THE PHONEME THEORIES

TOPICS FOR REPORTS:

1) I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay

2) L. V. Scerba

3) L. V. Scerba's School

4) Ferdinand de Saussure

5) The Prague Phonological School

6) The London Phonological School

7) The American Phonological School

8) The Copenhagen Trend

HOME PRACTICE

1) Revise the terminology & theory, namely in short:

- the phoneme,

- variants (allophones): the principal variant, the subsidiary variants (combinatory, positional),

- the three aspects of the phoneme: (1) material, real and objective, (2) abstract and generalized, and (3) functional;

- 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;

- the broad or phonemic transcription, the narrow or allophonic transcription.

2) What view upon the phoneme is illustrated by the oppositions:

мол-моль

лог-лёг

latter-ladder

3) Give examples to illustrate all types of allophones (principal, subsidiary; positional, combinatory).

QUESTIONS FOR SELF STUDY:

1) What are the ‘free variants’ of a phoneme?

2) What is the objective criterion for allophones classification?

3) What is the practical application of one’s knowledge about the differentiation of principal and subsidiary allophones?

4) How do the aspects of the phoneme penetrate each other forming a dialectical unity of contradiction?

5) How can abstract and material aspects of the phoneme be reflected in phonemic and allophonic transcription?

6) Illustrate with examples the morpheme-distinctive, word-distinctive and sentence-distinctive function of the phoneme.

7) Define ‘minimal pairs’ and state their role for successful communication.

NB!

Jones, Daniel

Jones was, with the possible exception of Henry Sweet, the most influential figure in the development of present-day phonetics in Britain. He was born in 1881 and died in 1967; he was for many years Professor of Phonetics at University College, London. He worked on many of the world's languages and on the theory of the phoneme and of phonetics, but is probably best remembered internationally for his works on the phonetics of English, particularly his Outline of English Phonetics and English Pronouncing Dictionary.

Sweet, Henry

Henry Sweet (1845-1912) was a great pioneer of phonetics based in Oxford University. He made extremely important contributions not only to the theory of phonetics (which he described as "the indispensable foundation to the study of language") but also to spelling reform, shorthand, philology, linguistics and language teaching. His best known works include the Primer of Phonetics, The Sounds of English and The Practical Study of Languages.

Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield studied under many different colleges; he graduated from Harvard in 1906, and then went on to graduate from the University of Wisconsin in 1908. He was the head Professor of German, and spent a lot of his time (1921-1928) teaching here. Leonard became interested in the description of languages, and how they pertained to science. When he got into this aspect of language, it is when he wrote his masterpiece Language. It dealt with a standard text, and had a tremendous influence on other linguists. Until very recently most United States linguists considered themselves in some sense as Bloomfield's disciples, whether they actually studied under him or not, and a great deal of American linguistic work has taken the form of working out questions raised and methods suggested by Bloomfield.

Who is who?

NB! The Phoneme Theories

A great number of linguists have discussed the idea of the phoneme and as a result several approaches to phonemic analysis or phonemics have been developed by them. One can distinguish five basic approaches:

The “mentalistic”or “psychological” approach, which considers the phoneme as an ideal sound at which the speaker aims, but which is difficult to achieve due to the influence of the neighbouring sounds and because it is nearly impossible to produce an identical repetition of the same sound.

This approach originated with the Polish linguist Baudoin de Courtenay, living and working in Russia (1845-1929), and a similar approach was adopted by the American linguist Sapir (1884-1939); his view, however, transcended the “mentalistic” approach.

The “physical” approach, which considers the phoneme as a “family” of sounds that must satisfy certain conditions: the various members of the “family” must be phonetically similar, and no member may occur in the same phonetic environment as any other (the latter condition is known as complimentary distribution).

The London School of Phonology, headed by the British linguist Daniel Jones, is known to have supported this view. D. Jones defined the phoneme as “a family of sounds consisting of an important sound of the language (generally the most frequently used member of the family) together with other related sounds which take its place in particular conditions of length or stress or intonation”. He pointed out that phonemes are capable of distinguishing one word of a language from other words of the same language.

D. Jones defined a speech sound as a “sound of definite organic formation and definite acoustic quality which is incapable of variation”.

American linguists in the 1940s also emphasized the phonetic reality of phonemes, paying particular attention to the distribution of sounds in an utterance. Swadesh underlined the importance of complementary distribution as a necessary criterion for the definition of the phoneme.

The “functional” approach, which regards the phoneme as the minimal sound unit by which meanings can be identified.

The American linguist Bloomfield defined the phoneme as “a minimum unit of distinctive sound feature”. In other words, the phoneme distinguished between words regarding their meanings. In every sound, only a certain number of phonetic features are involved in the identification of meanings; these are called distinctive features of the sound. For example, the phonetic feature common to all sounds in bidder is the feature of voicing; however, this can serve as a distinctive feature only in the third segment, [d], because its absence would create confusion with bitter. Therefore, when distinctive, voicing contrasts with voicelessness.

Some approaches have taken such oppositions as the basic elements of phonological structure. The Prague School (the name given to the views and methods of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, founded in 1926 by Vilem Mathesius, and including such linguists as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Troubetskoy), influenced by the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, they analysed the phoneme as a set of abstract distinctive features, or oppositions between sounds (such as voicing, nasality, etc.), an approach which was developed later by American Generative Phonology.

The “abstract” approach, which regards the phoneme as independent of the phonetic properties associated with them. The non-phonetic criteria for assigning sounds to phonemes are their involvement in morphological processes, and their distributional similarity in syllables and words (the latter is in fact a criterion for grouping phonemes). For example, in English “clear [l] and dark [l] alternate, (eg., cool [ku:l] – cooler [ku:lq], but never contrast, as a result, they can be assigned to the same phoneme. In English [f] alternates with [v] in life – lives, but it does not alternate in the words like cliff – cliffs, love – loves. Therefore, [f] and [v] cannot be assigned to the same phoneme. If we take into account the second criterion, English consonants, for example, can be classified according to whether [w], [l] and [r] can occur after some initial consonants (such as /k/, /g/, /s/ - kw, kl, kr, gw, gl, gr, sw, sl, sr). Some English consonants can occur before other initial consonants ( such as /p/, /b/, /f/ before /l/ and /r/ - pl,bl,fl and pr, br, fr).

The Copenhagen Linguistic Circle (Lois Hjelmslev, 1899 – 1965) also supported the abstract approach; their theory is known as glossematics. They state that phonetic properties are not involved at all in the way phonemes are established or in the way they are grouped into classes. They believed that if two phonemes are pronounced in the same way in a given context, they should be allocated to the same class.

Generative Phonology, which is grammatically oriented, owes much to Sapir. Generative phonological analysis begins with the presentation of the syntactic structure of the oral text and only then passes on to its phonological characteristics, being thus able to make use of any relevant syntactic data.

According to the Generative approach, the basic elements are some phonetic distinctive features, which are used to give the utterance its phonological representation, which in its turn has no connection most of the time with actual pronunciation. Its goal is to enable a root or an affix of the language to be represented in all its occurrences by the same sequence of phonological elements, irrespective of phonetic differences, depending on context. The link between the two representations – phonological and phonetic – is established by a set of “rules” which operate in a fixed order, adding, deleting, or modifying distinctive features.

Minimal Pairs

A basic test for a sound's distinctiveness is called a minimal pair test. A minimal pair consists of two forms with distinct meanings that differ by only one segment found in the same position in each form.

For example, the words sip and zip [sIp] - [zIp] are minimal pairs, as are pill and pick [pIl] - [pIk]. A change in the phonetic form produces a different word with a new meaning. When such a change is the result of the substitution of just one sound feature, the two different sounds must represent different phonemes and there is no other way to account for these particular meaning changes.

One of the possibilities to determine the inventory of sounds in a language capable of conveying separate meanings is to see whether substituting one sound for another results in a different word. In order for two speech sounds to differ and to contrast meanings, there should be some phonetic difference between the substituted sounds. If it is, the two sounds represent different phonemes. When two different forms are identical in every possible way except for one sound feature that occurs in the same place in the string, the two words are called minimal pairs.

Contrasting sound features in two words of a minimal pair are called distinctive features. Sound features reflect individual aspects of articulatory control or acoustic effects produced by articulation. When a sound feature distinguishes one phoneme from another, the phonetic difference is distinctive, since this difference alone accounts for the contrast or difference in meaning. Phonetic environmentin which sounds occurrepresents a certain phonetic context. By the phonetic context we understand the surrounding sounds (speech sounds or noises), tempo, stress, loudness, tone and other prosodic features, which provide the basis for sound variation.

Pairs that show segments in nearly identical environments, such as azure /assure or author/ either, are called near-minimal pairs. They help to establish contrasts where no minimal pairs can be found.

Minimal pairs or near-minimal pairs help us establish which sounds contrast in a language; phonetic similarity and complementary distribution help us decide which sounds are allophones of a phoneme. But not all examples of variation among sounds can be dealt with through these approaches.

In some cases, phonetically similar sounds are neither in complimentary distribution nor are they found to contrast. It is still possible to determine which phonemes these sounds belong to. A case in point is the variation in English voiceless stops [p, t, k] when they are found in word-final position, as in the word stop. There are at least three pronunciations of the word stop in English. Since there is no difference in the meaning of these forms and since the final consonants are phonetically similar, linguists consider that these sounds are in free variation, and that they are all allophones of the phoneme /p/. The same pattern holds for the other voiceless stops of English.

In any language there could be found minimal pairs that identify its phonemic inventory.

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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------