Phoneme Theory in Foreign Linguistics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Phoneme Theory in Foreign Linguistics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Content

 

1. Definition of the phoneme

2. Phoneme theory from the aspect of B. de Courtenay

3. L. Bloomfield and the American phonological school

4. D. Jones and he London phonological school

5. N.S. Trubetzkoy and the Prague phonological school

6. L. Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen phonological school

Conclusion

Bibliography

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Definition of the phoneme

 

In order to study phoneme theory in the view of different foreign linguists I must cite the definitions of the notion “phoneme”.

Most linguists regarded the phonemes as one of the basic units of a language.  The term phoneme was first used by Kruzenski in late 1870s.  Some linguists like Bloomfield and Daniel Jones describe phonemes in purely physical terms.  Others like Sapir prefer psychological definition.  Some regard phonemes only as abstract fictitious units and argue that these are not phonemes but allophones that exist in reality. 

The definitions of the phoneme vary greatly.

L.V. Scherba (a Russian linguist and lexicographer specializing in phonetics and phonology) says that the phoneme may be viewed as a functional, material and abstract unit.

V.A.Vassilyev (Russian phonetician) emphasizes that phoneme is a smallest unit capable of distinguishing one word from another word, one grammatical form of word from another.

Bernand Bloch (American post-Bloomfieldian linguist) notices that phoneme is a class of phonemically similar sounds contrasting and mutually exclusive with all similar classes in the language.

Jacobson (Russian linguist) considers phoneme to be a minimal sound which meaning may be discriminated.

Let us consider the phoneme from the point of view of three aspects:

1. The phoneme is a functional unit. Function is usually understood to mean discriminatory function, that is, the role of the various components of the phonetic system of the language in distinguishing one morpheme from another, one word from another or also one utterance from another.

2. The phoneme is material, real and objective. It means that it is realized in speech in the form of speech sounds, its allophones. The sets of speech sounds, which are the allophones belonging to the same phoneme are not identical in their articulatory content though there remains some phonetic similarity between them.

3. Allophones of the same phoneme, no matter how different their articulation may be, function as the same linguistic unit. Phonemes differentiate words like “tie” and “die” from each other, and to be able to hear and produce phonemic differences is part of what it means to be a competent speaker of the language. Allophones, on the other hand, have no such function: they usually occur in different positions in the word  and hence cannot be opposed to each other to make meaningful distinctions.

So the function of phonemes is to distinguish the meaning of morphemes and words. So the phoneme is an abstract linguistic unit, it is an abstraction from actual speech sounds, that is allophonic modifications.

The theory of the phoneme was being treated by many linguists abroad. It was investigated by the scientists of “The Prague Linguistic School” (N.S. Trubetskoy;  Jacobson,  M. Halle).

Some foreign linguists (E. Sapier, W.F. Twaddell) treated the phoneme apart from its real sound value. As a result the real human speech sounds were replaced by abstract properties of sounds. The phoneme figured as a symbol of a certain quality of the sound.

The English linguist D. Jones fell in another extreme, treating the phoneme as a sound fully disconnected from its sense-differentiating function. D. Jones treated the phoneme as a group of sounds united by similar articulation features. According to D. Jones, a phoneme is a group of sounds consisting of an important sound together with other related sounds.

 

2. Phoneme theory from the aspects of B. de Courtenay

 

Baudouin de Courtenay used the term “phoneme” for linguistic units underlying sound alternations between related forms. His work on the phoneme theory may be roughly subdivided into two periods:

Firstly, he considered a phoneme to be a component of a morpheme. He stated that one and the same morpheme was always represented by the same combination of sounds (as in Slavonic languages).He centered his attention mainly on the phenomenon of phonetic and historical alternations.

Secondly, he abandoned this conception in the 90^th of the XIX century and began to search for a unit not bound by the limits of a morpheme. He defined a phoneme as an idea of a sound which appears in the mind of a speaker before the sound is uttered.

A speech sound is an invention of the scientists. What really exists is the perception of a sound, the complex perception of the articulatory movements, muscular sensation and acoustic impressions? This complex perception is a phoneme.

Baudouin de Courtenay went on developing the theory of phoneme in his “Versuch  einer Theorie der Phonetischen Alternationen” (written in 1917) and other works.

I should not underestimate the importance of Baudouin de Courtenay’s theory. He was the first in the history of the development of linguistics to elaborate the theory of the phoneme, to consider human speech sounds from the viewpoint of their functions and thus, created the teaching of the grammatical part of phonetics.

 

3. L. Bloomfield and the American phonological school.

 

L. Bloomfield considers  phoneme to be the smallest units which make a difference in meaning, a minimum unit of distinctive sound feature. In other words, phoneme is an externally defined, non-mentalistic unit. He identifies “primary” (or segmental sounds) and “secondary” (or stress and tone) phonemes according to their function in language (primary: syllable forming; secondary: structuring larger units).

Bloomfield recognized the need for underlying forms to simplify the description of morphophonemic alternations. Only later (in 1939) he called for a separate discipline called morphophonemics whose basic units were morphophonemes. He chose the forms and used ordered rules to achieve the simplest possible description. He even set up “artificial” underlying forms to achieve a simpler description.

The American phonological school is headed by L. Bloomfield and E. Sapir. Their approach of the phoneme theory is synchronic. They treat the linguistic phenomena from the point of view of structuralism- “pattern is habit, behavior is culture”. They compare linguistic processes with a fire in a wooden stove, they are invisible. The system of the language may be compared with any system of signs, for example, with Morse code.

Post-Bloomfieldians were strictly insistent on the separation of levels (morphophonemics from phonology) and did not accept ordered rules. 

Bernand Bloch abd George Trager saw the phoneme as a class of sounds (physical definition). According to them, a phoneme is a class of phonetically similar sounds, contrasting and mutually exclusive with all similar classes in the language.

Zellig Harris, on the hand, saw the phoneme as a purely logical symbol. Part of the problem underlying these fundamental disagreements is the amount of variation to be catered for by the description (idiolect, dialect, pan-dialectal language). Non-uniqueness of the phonetic-phonemic relationship; the non-determinability of the phoneme from the phonetic properties and the non-prediction of the phonetic properties from the phoneme (lack of bi-uniqueness) was a problem.

Hockett addressed the unclear relationship between morphemes and phonemes. It is clearly illogical to say that morphemes consist of phonemes. On the other hand, morphemes have alternants (morphs) and morphs have differing phonemic structure. Following Hjelmlev, Hockett distinguishes content units (morphemes) and expression units (phonemes). He also makes a distinction between representation and composition.

 

4. D. Jones and the London phonological school

 

Under “the London Phonological School” I mean the theory and methods of phonetic and phonological analysis proposed by the British linguists. This school is represented by J. R. Firth, Daniel Jones, D. Abercrombie, I. Ward, L. Armstrong, D. B. Fry, H. Kingdon, J. D. O'Connor, A. C. Gimson. The British linguists presented original ideas on phonemic and prosodic analysis. Well-known British linguists D. Jones and J. R. Firth gave brief explanations of the phoneme concept.

The London phonological school is headed by Prof. D. Jones of London and is concerned with the physical conception of the phoneme. His views are expressed in a number of works. According to him a phoneme is defined as a family of sounds in a given language which are related in character and are used in such a way that no one member ever occurs in a word in the same phonetic context as any other member.

He breaks up the phoneme into atoms and considers different features of a phoneme as independent phenomena. He distinguishes tones and tonemes in tone languages, strones and stronemes as different degrees of stress, chrones and chronemes as different length of vowels. His aim is to give a phoneme a purely practical application.

D. Jones admits the fact that the idea of the phoneme was first introduced to him by Leningrad professor L. V. Scherba in 1911, but both the theory and the term itself had existed for more than thirty years even then. D. Jones wrote that according to J. R. Firth the term “phoneme” was invented as distinct from “phone” in 1879 by Krushevsky. Thus, both outstanding English linguists were familiar with the theory and term “phoneme” used by Russian linguists. The “prephoneme” period - that is when there was no distinction between “speech sound” and “phoneme” until 1870.

 

5. N.S. Trubetzkoy and the Prague phonological school

 

The phoneme theory was further developed by the Linguistic Society of Prague. The head of the school is N.S. Trubetzkoy. He first became acquainted with the phoneme theory through the works of Baudouin de Courtenay and Scherba. He propounded his phonological views in a number of works, the principal of which is “Grundzuge der Phonologie”.

The main points of his theory are:

1. The separation of phonology from phonetics;

2. The theory of phonological oppositions;

3. The theory of the arc-phoneme.

He developed de Saussure’s principle of the separation of speech from language by proclaiming a new science - phonology as distinct from phonetics. According to him, phonology is a linguistic science. It should concern itself with the distinctive features only which are connected with meaning, while phonetics is a biological science, it should concern itself with the sounds of a language, as they are pronounced and as they are heard, without paying any special attention to their function in the language. Trubetzkoy further develops his system of oppositions by giving special prominence to the most essential members:

1. The phoneme, which he defines as a unity of the phonologically relevant features of a sound;

2. The speech sound, which he defines as a unity of all the features, both relevant and irrelevant, of a sound representing the phoneme in connected speech.

Some oppositions may be neutralized. The phoneme in the position of neutralization is the arc-phoneme, a unity of relevant features common to two phonemes.

 

6. L. Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen phonological school

 

The Copenhagen trend is known as structuralism. Their treatment of the phoneme is mathematical. They consider the phoneme in mathematical ratios and compare the language with a system of signs. Their approach is synchronical as well.

Hjelmslev’s work in phonology can be said to date from 1931, the year of the International Congress of Linguistics in Geneva. At that meeting the phonologists of the Prague school were actively proselytizing for their novel approach to sound structure. One result of this was formation of phonological committees in various research centers; and Hjelmslev participated in the creation of such a committee in Copenhagen under the auspices of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen. The initial goal of this committee was to produce a phonological description of Danish, but Hjelmslev’s work tended more toward the creation of a general theory of sound structure, especially after he began to work together with Hans Jorgen Uldall.

The collaboration between Hjelmslev and Uldall began shortly after his return, within the context of the phonological committee. Its first concrete result was a paper “On the Principles of phonematics”, presented to the International congress of Phonetic Science in London in 1935. While the picture of “phonematics” presented in the paper is quite close in spirit to Praguian phonology, it also diverges quite clearly in important details. For instance, Hjelmslev and Uldall reject both the sort of psychological definition of phonemes characteristics of the very earliest Prague school work under the influence of Baudouin de Couetenay, and also any sort of purely phonetic definition which would identify phonemes with external physically properties of the speech event. Instead, they require thet phonemes to be defined exclusively by criteria of distribution, alternation, etc., within the linguistic pattern, as foreshadowed already in Hjemslev’s earlier “Principes de grammaire generale”.

 

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

In conclusion I want to repeat the main moments of this work and to summarize the notions and approaches to their study of different linguists and phonetic schools. 

The founder of the phoneme theory was Baudouin de Courtenay who was the head of the Kazan linguistic school. He defined phoneme as a physical image of a sound. He also regarded phonemes as fictitious units and considered them to be only perceptions. This approach can be called mentalistic or physical.

The abstract approach belongs to the Prague phonological school, the followers of Ferdinand de Saussure who viewed phonemes as the sum of acoustic impressions and articulatory movements. He also viewed phonemes as disembodied units of the language formed by the differences separating the acoustic image of one sound from the rest of the units. Language in his opinion contains nothing but differences.

N.S. Trubetskoy (the head of the Prague phonological school) defined the phoneme as a unity of phonologically relevant features. Relevant feature is the feature without which we can’t distinguish one phoneme from another. This approach can be called functional.

Another kind of approach to the nature of the phoneme was expressed by a British scholar, the head of the London phonological school, Daniel Jones. He defined the phoneme as a family of sounds.

The American phonological school (headed by Blumfield and Sapir) defined the phoneme as a minimum unit of distinctive sound features and as abstractional unit.

The materialistic approach was expressed by Scherba. Academician Scherba defined the phoneme as a real independent distinctive unit which manifests itself in the form of its allophones. This approach comprises the abstract and the functional.

Summing up I can state that the phoneme comprises material, real and objective features and at the same time distinctive abstractional and generalized features because it represents all the relevant features which are present in all the allophones of the phoneme. It exists in the material form of speech sounds (allophones).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Яковлев Н.Ф. Принципы фонемологии // Вопросы  языкознания (№6), 1983.

Bruce E. Nevin. Harris the Revolutionary: Phonemic Theory. –  Bolt Beranek and Newman, University of Pennsylvania, 1993.

Bruce Hayes. About phonemes  // Introductory phonology (by Bruce Hayes).

T.T. Vrabel. Lectures in Theoretical Phonetics of the English Language and Method-Guides for Seminars. – Ungvar, 2009. 

Электронная энциклопедия Википедия. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/

Vassilyev V.A. English phonetics a theoretical course, 1970.