The prague phological school

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 “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 “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).