Lecture 2 phonological theories I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay’s Theory of Phonology

3. The Moscow Phonological School
Another scientific approach to the phoneme concept in Russia is known as the Moscow phonological school. This school is represented by R.I. Avanesov, V.N. Sidorov, A.A. Reformatsky (1901-1978), P.S. Kuznetzov (1899-1968), A.M. Sukhotin, M.V. Panov, N.F. Jakovlev.
One of the first linguists to give a definition of phoneme void of psychologic elements was N.F. Jakovlev: «Phonemes are understood those phonic properties that can be analyzed from the speech flow as the shortest elements serving to differentiate units of meaning.
The representatives of the Moscow phonological school based their definition of a phoneme on the concept of the morpheme. A.A. Reformatsky gave the following definition of the phoneme: «Phonemes are minimal units of the sound structure of a language, serving to form and differentiate meaningful units: morphemes and words». Phonemes are meaningless units of a language but they are capable of distinguishing meaningful units as their sequences may form mor-phemes and words. For example, pit - lit, but - bet etc.
Analyzing the sound changes in the morphemic structure of a language, it is possible to establish two different positions: stressed and unstressed. In a stressed position phonemes can preserve their phonetic characteristics, while in an unstressed position they change their articulatory and acoustic features. This fact is very important in the phonetic analysis of Russian vowels. In the Russian word вода /vadˈ ʌ/ there are two variants or allophones of the phoneme /ʌ/: stressed and unstressed, which are different as to their quantitative feature because usually stressed vowels are longer than unstressed ones. But if we take the word forms воды /vodi/, водный /vodnij/, водяной /və djanoj/ in the morpheme вод we can distinguish the sound alternations /ʌ'-о-ə/. In such cases R.I. Avanesov proposes to define each member of alternations /ʌ'-о-ə/ as variants of one phoneme /o/. Likewise in the words