LECTURE 2.
PHONOLOGICAL THEORIES
Problems to be discussed:
2.1 Baudouin De Courtnay’s Theory of Phonology
2.2. The St.Petersburg Phonological School. L.V.Shcherba’s Phonemic Concept
2.3. The Moscow Phonological School
2.4. The Prague Phonological School
The “prephoneme”
period, I.e. when there was no distinction between “speech
sound” and “phoneme” until 1870;
The “phonemic” period, which
began in 1870 and includes the twentieth
century. In this period the basic 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 i mages 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 considered that
words may be realized in notions. I.A.Baudouin de Courtenay repeatedly stated that
semantically the utterance breaks up into sentences, into significative words, words
into morphological components or morphemes and morphemes into phonemes. As a
morpheme is only divided into divided into components of the same nature as itself:
these components –phonemes must also be significative.
The St.Petersburg Phonological School’s theory is closely connected with the
name of academician Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba (1880 -1944), a talanted student of
I.A.Baudouin de Courtenay .L.V.Shcherba developed the phonemic concept
represented by his research advisor. L.V.Shcherba repeatedly stressed the differential
function of the phoneme. He gave the following definition of the phoneme: “The
shortest general sound image of a given language, which is capable of associating
with images of meaning differentiating words, . . .,is called phoneme”.In this
definition besides the term “ sound image», which shows the influence of psychology
, everything is clear from the phonological view point . Although L.V.Shcherba
realized that phonemes are not general images which are the result of different
perceptions. L.V. Shcherba illustrated his phonemic theory with examples from
variations in the pronunciations of languages may depend on their phonetic structures
and linguistic habits the sum of which L.V.Shcherba called the articulation basis.
L.V. Shcherba also indicated three aspects of speech sounds: biological
(physiological), physical and linguistic (social), of which he paid special attention to
the last aspect. In speech communication physiologically and physically different
articulations (for example [a]) may be generalized by one meaning. Such a
generalized unit is called a
phoneme.
Thus, L.V. Shcherba underlined the