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CHAPTER II. PRACTICAL PART. EXERCISES AND ANALYSIS OF THE WORDS FROM LITERARY WORKS.
2.1 Phonetic analysis of the words from the literary work
The Phoneme Theories
A great number of linguists have discussed the idea of the phoneme and as a result several approaches to phonemic analysis or phonemics have been developed by them. One can distinguish five basic approaches:
The “mentalistic”or “psychological” approach, which considers the phoneme as an ideal sound at which the speaker aims, but which is difficult to achieve due to the influence of the neighbouring sounds and because it is nearly impossible to produce an identical repetition of the same sound.
This approach originated with the Polish linguist Baudoin de Courtenay, living and working in Russia (1845-1929), and a similar approach was adopted by the American linguist Sapir (1884-1939); his view, however, transcended the “mentalistic” approach.
The “physical” approach, which considers the phoneme as a “family” of sounds that must satisfy certain conditions: the various members of the “family” must be phonetically similar, and no member may occur in the same phonetic environment as any other (the latter condition is known as complimentary distribution).
The Prague school of linguistics is represented by the names of Vilem Mathesius, Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetskoy, et al. The group favored the synchronic, or descriptive, approach to linguistics. The basic contributions of this linguistic school are 1. The theory of the phoneme, 2.The theory of oppositions and the oppositional method (N.Trubetskoy), 3. The functional sentence perspective (or the theory of communicative dynamism), 4. The theory of the asymmetry of a linguistic sign ( S. Karčevsky).
The London School of Phonology, headed by the British linguist Daniel Jones, is known to have supported this view. D. Jones defined the phoneme as “a family of sounds consisting of an important sound of the language (generally the most frequently used member of the family) together with other related sounds which take its place in particular conditions of length or stress or intonation”. He pointed out that phonemes are capable of distinguishing one word of a language from other words of the same language.
D. Jones defined a speech sound as a “sound of definite organic formation and definite acoustic quality which is incapable of variation”.
American linguists in the 1940s also emphasized the phonetic reality of phonemes, paying particular attention to the distribution of sounds in an utterance. Swadesh underlined the importance of complementary distribution as a necessary criterion for the definition of the phoneme.
The “functional” approach, which regards the phoneme as the minimal sound unit by which meanings can be identified.
The American linguist Bloomfield defined the phoneme as “a minimum unit of distinctive sound feature”. In other words, the phoneme distinguished between words regarding their meanings. In every sound, only a certain number of phonetic features are involved in the identification of meanings; these are called distinctive features of the sound. For example, the phonetic feature common to all sounds in bidder is the feature of voicing; however, this can serve as a distinctive feature only in the third segment, [d], because its absence would create confusion with bitter. Therefore, when distinctive, voicing contrasts with voicelessness.
Some approaches have taken such oppositions as the basic elements of phonological structure. The Prague School (the name given to the views and methods of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, founded in 1926 by Vilem Mathesius, and including such linguists as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Troubetskoy), influenced by the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, they analysed the phoneme as a set of abstract distinctive features, or oppositions between sounds (such as voicing, nasality, etc.), an approach which was developed later by American Generative Phonology.
The “abstract” approach, which regards the phoneme as independent of the phonetic properties associated with them. The non-phonetic criteria for assigning sounds to phonemes are their involvement in morphological processes, and their distributional similarity in syllables and words (the latter is in fact a criterion for grouping phonemes). For example, in English “clear [l] and dark [l] alternate, (eg., cool [ku:l] – cooler [ku:lq], but never contrast, as a result, they can be assigned to the same phoneme. In English [f] alternates with [v] in life – lives, but it does not alternate in the words like cliff – cliffs, love – loves. Therefore, [f] and [v] cannot be assigned to the same phoneme. If we take into account the second criterion, English consonants, for example, can be classified according to whether [w], [l] and [r] can occur after some initial consonants (such as /k/, /g/, /s/ - kw, kl, kr, gw, gl, gr, sw, sl, sr). Some English consonants can occur before other initial consonants ( such as /p/, /b/, /f/ before /l/ and /r/ - pl,bl,fl and pr, br, fr).
The Copenhagen Linguistic Circle (Lois Hjelmslev, 1899 – 1965) also supported the abstract approach; their theory is known as glossematics. They state that phonetic properties are not involved at all in the way phonemes are established or in the way they are grouped into classes. They believed that if two phonemes are pronounced in the same way in a given context, they should be allocated to the same class.
Generative Phonology, which is grammatically oriented, owes much to Sapir. Generative phonological analysis begins with the presentation of the syntactic structure of the oral text and only then passes on to its phonological characteristics, being thus able to make use of any relevant syntactic data.
According to the Generative approach, the basic elements are some phonetic distinctive features, which are used to give the utterance its phonological representation, which in its turn has no connection most of the time with actual pronunciation. Its goal is to enable a root or an affix of the language to be represented in all its occurrences by the same sequence of phonological elements, irrespective of phonetic differences, depending on context. The link between the two representations – phonological and phonetic – is established by a set of “rules” which operate in a fixed order, adding, deleting, or modifying distinctive features.
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