• Гідрологія і Гідрометрія
• Господарське право
• Економіка будівництва
• Економіка природокористування
• Економічна теорія
• Земельне право
• Історія України
• Кримінально виконавче право
• Медична радіологія
• Методи аналізу
• Міжнародне приватне право
• Міжнародний маркетинг
• Основи екології
• Предмет Політологія
• Соціальне страхування
• Технічні засоби організації дорожнього руху
• Товарознавство продовольчих товарів

Main trends in phoneme theory.

Most linguists have looked upon the phoneme as one of the basic language units. But not all of them have described it in the same way. In general, views of the phoneme fall into five main classes:

1) mentalistic or psychological;

2) functional;

3) abstract;

4) physical;

5) populational.

The mentalistic or psychologicalview regards the phoneme as an ideal mental image, or a target at which the speaker aims. Actually pronounced speech sounds are imperfect realizations of these images partly because an ideal repetition of a sound is next to impossible and partly because of the influence exerted by neighboring sounds. This theory was originated by the Russian linguist J.A. Baudouin de Courtenay. It was shared by the Norwegian linguist Alfred Sommerfelt who described phonemes as “models which speakers seek to reproduce” though it’s not possible to establish such ideal sounds which do not exist in reality.

The functionalview regards the phoneme as the minimal sound unit by which meanings may be differentiated. According to this conception, in every sound only a certain number of the articulatory features are involved in the differentiation of meanings. Such features are called distinctive. Non-distinctive features are not taken into account, because they do not differentiate meanings. Such an approach to the phoneme separates it from actually pronounced speech sounds. This view is shared by N.S. Trubetzkoy, L. Bloomfield and other foreign linguists.

A stronger form of the functional approach is the abstractview, which regards phonemes as essentially independent of the acoustic and physiological properties associated with them, that is of speech sounds. This idea was introduced by L. Hjelmslev and developed by his colleagues.

The psychological, functional and abstract views of the phoneme can be qualified as idealistic, since all of them look upon the phoneme as an abstract conception existing in the mind but not in the reality that is in human speech and speech sounds are considered only as phonetic manifestations of these conceptions.

The physicalview regards the phoneme as a group of articulatory similar sounds without taking into consideration its functional and abstract aspects, though it is impossible to assign sounds to the same phoneme without their substitution in the same phonetic context and regardless the change in meaning. So this approach to the phoneme, developed by D. Jones, is opposed to the previous three purely idealistic ones, as it implicitly denies, disregards or underestimates the abstracted and generalized character of the phoneme.

The populationalview regards the phoneme as a unit of:

an idiolect – individual speech of members of the same language community (K. Pike);

a dialect – a distinct form of a language distinguished from other forms by differences in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary (L. Bloomfield);

a multidialect – the concrete language as a whole (H. Smith);

a supralect – a standard form of a language by which the dialects and idiolects may be compared (J. Perry).

Переглядів: 3756