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. Views of the phoneme fall into 4 main classes.

1) The “mentalistic” or “psychological” view regards the phoneme as an ideal “mental image” or a target at which the speaker aims. He deviates from this ideal sound partly because an identical repetition of a sound is next to impossible and partly because of the influence of neighbouring sounds. According to this conception allophones of the phoneme are varying materializations of it. This view was originated by the founder of the phoneme theory, the Russian linguist I.A.Baudewin de Courtenay (‘bo:dwən di ku:ti’nes). This view was shared by Alf. Sommerfelt. This approach to the phoneme as clearly idealistic, as it is definitely not possible to establish ideal sounds which do not exist in reality.

2) The so – called “functional” view regards the phoneme as the minimal sound unit by which meanings may be differentiated without much regard to actually pronounced speech sounds. Meaning differentiation is taken to be a defining characteristics of phonemes. Thus the absence of palatalization in L and palatalization of L in English do not differentiate meanings, and therefore can’t be assigned to different phonemes but form allophones of the phoneme L. The same articulatory features of the Russian л and л’ do differentiate meaning (мол - моль), and must be assigned to different phonemes in Russian. According to this conception the phoneme is not a family of sounds, since in every sound only a certain number of the articulatory features are involved in the differentiation of meanings. It is the so – called distinctive features of the sound which make up the phoneme corresponding to it.

The functional approach extracts non-distinctive features from the phonemes thus divorcing the phoneme from actually pronounced speech sounds. This view is shared by many foreign linguists: N.Trubetskoy, L.Bloomfield, R.Jakobson.

3) A stronger form of the “functional” approach is advocated in the so – called “abstract” view of the phoneme, which regards phonemes as essentially independent of the acoustic and physiological properties associated with them, that is of speech sounds. This view was pioneered by L.Hjelmslev and his followers in the Copenhagen Lingustic Circle.

The views of the phoneme given above can be qualitied as idealistic, since all of them regard the phoneme as an abstract conception existing in the mind but not in the reality.

4) The “physical” view regards the phoneme as a “family” of related sounds satisfying certain conditions:

1. The various members of the “family” must show phonetic similarity to one another, in other words, be related in character.

2. No member of the “family” may occur in the same phonetic context as any other.

This approach may seem to be vulgarly materialistic since it views the phoneme as a group of articulatorily similar sounds without any regard to its functional and abstract aspects.

Summarizing we may state that the materialistic conception of the phoneme first put forward by L.V.Shcherba may be regarded as the most suitable for the purpose of teaching.

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