Билет № 4

The segmental phoneme is the smallest language unit that exists in the speech of all the members of a giving language community as such speech sounds which are capable of distinguishing one word from another word of the same language or one grammatical form of the same word.

The phoneme is a dialectical unity of its three aspects reflected in its definition given above (1) material, real and objective, (2) abstractional and gener­alized, and (3) functional.

The phoneme is a unity of these aspects because they are inseparably connected, fused with one another. (They can be separated from one another only for purposes of analysis and description.)

The phoneme is a dialectical unity of these aspects be­cause they determine one another and are thus interdepen­dent.

Materialistic approach

The segmental phoneme has a material aspect, in the sense that it exists in the form of a number of articulatorily and acoustically definite speech sounds, its allophones, which all have several common articulatory and therefore acoustic, features constituting the material invariant of the phoneme. Thus, actual speech sounds, which are always variants of some phonemes, constitute the material substratum of the phoneme.

What is material is at the same time real. The phoneme is therefore, a reality; it is a linguistic reality, because phonemes exist in actual speech. Thus the materiality and reality of the phoneme is manifested in the common core of articulatory and acoustic features which all the allophones of a particular phoneme have.

Prof. L. V. Scerba (1880—1944), the most gifted pupil of Prof. Baudouin, continued the work of the latter, and ultimately created a materialistic phoneme Аtheory.

The definition given in his master's thesis is mentalistic. It runs as follows: "The phoneme is the shortest generic phonetical perception in a given language capable of being associated with semantic perceptions, of distinguishing words, and of being easily isolated from a word”.

The principal points of L. V. Scerba's phoneme theory are: (1) the theory of phonemic variants; (2) the theory of phonemic independence.

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Phonemic variants are very important, because they may dev­elop into new phonemes: on the other hand, a phoneme may cease to function as such, and may become a phonemic variant.

L. V. Scerba considered of great importance the fact that phonemes have a certain amount of independence, Their independence can be proved in two Ways: a phoneme is capable of expressing a meaning by itself [f:] in many languages commands silence. Exclamations like "[ou], [a:] with appropriate intonations serve to express different emotions.

Abstract approach

The second (abstractional) aspect of the phoneme consists in its abstracted and generalized character. This is reflected in the definition of the phoneme as a language unit. Each unit of language — the phoneme, the morpheme, the word, the sentence — is an abstraction from and a generalization of actual utterances! Language itself is an abstrac­tion from and a generalization of speech, while speech is the reality of language.

In another variety of the entirely abstractional conception of the phoneme the latter is regarded as a disem­bodied unit of language. This conception was originated by Ferdinand de Saussure, the famous Swiss linguist, who was the first exponent of the phoneme theory in Western Europe. Here is his definition of the phoneme: “A phoneme is the sum of acoustic impressions and of articulatory movements, of that which is heard and of which is pronounced, both mutually dependent”.

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