Variant №15 Explain I. A. Baudoin de Courtenay’s phonological theory

Variant № 15

1. Explain I.A. Baudoin de Courtenay’s phonological theory.
Baudouin de Courtenay invented the concept of alternational phonology. His best known work (because a version was published in German) was An Attempt at a Theory of Phonetic Alternations. It was first published in English in Edward Stankiewicz’s 1972 A Baudouin de Courtenay Anthology, but the sheer weight of material in that work tends to overwhelm the simple, fundamental insight that Baudouin came to distinguish as the physiophonetic/psychophonetic alternational dichotomy. To take one of the many examples from his work, consider the Polish word for frost: mróz (nom. sg) in contrast to mroza (gen. sg.). The phonetic representations would be [mrus] and [‘mroza], respectively. This word pair contains one psychophonetic alternation [u] vs. [o] and one physiophonetic alternation [s] vs. [z]. The difference, according to Baudouin, was that the [u/o] alternation represented two distinct phonemes of Polish and the [s/z] alternation represented a single phoneme. That is, the Polish speaker perceived and pronounced two distinct vocalic sounds, but a single fricative sound. The single phoneme at the end of mróz was /z/, which happened to correspond with Polish spelling. Baudouin did not have a process-oriented theory of language to work with, but there can be no doubt that he saw the generalization that modern generative linguists capture as a rule of obstruent devoicing in the codas of Polish syllables. Notice a very important fact about this example. Baudouin de Courtenay started out with a theory of the phoneme that incorporated so-called phonemic neutralization. By the same token, he still recognized alternations between different phonemes. Baudouin also gave examples of what would be called allophonic variation by later phonemicists, but he did not make a big deal of the difference between allophony and phonemic neutralization. Hence, Morris Halle’s argument against so-called classical phonemic representation never even touched Baudouin’s dichotomy. If anything, it exonerated the original dichotomy, which had fallen into disfavor during the structuralist period.