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

LECTURE 2

PHONOLOGICAL THEORIES

1. I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay’s Theory of Phonology

The formation of the phonological theory may be divided into two periods:

1. The «prephoneme» period, i.e. when there was no distinction between «speech sound» and «phoneme» until 1870;

2. The «phonemic» period, which began in 1870 and includes the twentieth century. In this period the basic phonetic and phonological terms and concepts were proposed, and the distinction between the actually pronounced speech sounds and the phonemes as functional units of the language was recognized. The first linguist to point out this distinction was I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), an outstanding Russian and Polish scholar.

I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay defined the phoneme as the «psychological» equivalent of the speech sound». But he was aware of the fact that acoustic and motor images of the speech sound do not correspond to each other. I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay also tried to analyse phonemes on the bases of phonetic alternations in morphemes. Besides psychological and morphological definitions of the phoneme, he could propose the distinctive function of the speech sound in notions‘ as he considered that words may be realized in notions. I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay repeatedly stated that semantically the utterance breaks up into sentences, sentences into significative words, words into morphological components or morphemes and morphemes into phonemes. As a morpheme is only divided into components of the same nature as itself: these components - phonemes must also be significative.

He admitted the division of morphemes into physical or physiological elements to be unjustified in linguistic analysis. He criticized N V. Krushevsky‘s conception of this problem. Incidentally, N.V. Krushevsky, was one of his students who introduced the term «phoneme» at the same time as F. de Saussure, an eminent Swiss linguist did. I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay's fundamental ideas had a great influence on the development of later phonological theories both in our country and abroad. In early phonological works many linguists defined the pho-neme as «sound image», «conscious sound image», «sound intent» (N. S. Trubetzkoy), and also as the sum of acoustic impressions and of articulatory movements (F. de Saussure) but none of them suggested any other to substitute the term «phoneme». Nevertheless I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay‘s psychological interpretation of the phoneme concept could not lead to an obliteration of the boundary between sound and phoneme; it was merely a terminological mixture of psychological and linguistic concepts which greatly influenced each other in that period. Many interesting ideas stating linguistic functions of speech sounds may be found in his works. He showed the articulatory - acoustic, morphological and semantic aspects of sound material and their relationship. I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay's idea of the distinctive-semantic function of speech sound was very important in relation to the modern theory of distinctive features of the phoneme, according to which the phoneme of a given language may be divided from a sys-tem of sequences which is formed by their constituents, i.e. by distinctive features. As the morphemes may be divided into phonemes, likewise phonemes are divided into distinctive features which are interpreted either in articulatory or acoustic terms. In spite of the various approaches to the problem of establishing an inventory of the phonemes in a given language, which should be possible on the basis of breaking up utterances or words into the smallest segments or by the method of commutation test, counting minimal pairs of words like pill - bill, till - mill, kill - hill etc. The fundamental discussion on the problems of phonemic analysis is still going on among phonemicists.