Lection 3: Main Trends in the Phoneme Theory. Methods of Phonological Analysis

I. Conceptions that pay special attention to the abstract aspect.
According to mentalistic and psychological view, the phoneme is an ideal mental image, it doesn’t exist objectively, it exists only in the mind of the speaker. Actual speech sounds are imperfect realization of it. These ideals were expressed by Baudauin de Courtenay and by Sommerfelt.


II. Conception that can be called “functional” because special focus is given to the ability of the phoneme to differentiate the meaning.
Scholars are particularly interested in relevant or distinctive features of the phoneme, while non-distinctive features are often ignored. This view was shared by Трубецкой, Якобсон and Bloomfield. The great achievement of these scholars was that it gave rise to phonology as a linguistic discipline. However, it resulted in the separation of phonetics (физическая сторона) and phonology (речевая сторона).
The aim of phonology is the study of the system of distincted features and meaningful aspect of the phoneme. Phonetics was limited to the description of physiological and acoustic characteristics of speech sounds without reference to their linguistic function. The scholars claimed only phonology was a linguistic discipline, while phonetics should belong to biology. Thus we can say that the material aspect of the phoneme was ignored within this approach.


III. The group concerned with the material aspect.
The physical view represented by Daniel Jones and B.Bloch regards the phoneme as the family of related sounds. In other words the phoneme is a mechanical sum of its allophones. So, similarity between sounds is considered to be the main criterion for attributing them to a particular phoneme. We see that the representatives of this approach ignore the abstract and functional aspect of the phoneme.

This brief overview of the approaches demonstrate that the definition given by Щерба is definitely a comprehensive one because it gives equal importance to all the three aspects of the phoneme: material, abstract, functional.