The interrelationships among the phonemes of the language.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 556.

PHONOLOGICAL OPOSITION IN ENGLISH.

The number of phonemes in any language is established through making up phonological oppositions. They are pairs of words in which only one phoneme changes the meaning.

Ex. “day” and “do” show the existence of the diphthongs as opposed to a monophthong \u\

“take” and “cake” show the existence of forelingual \t\ and backlingual \k\.

There are several approaches to the problem of different phonemes having the same allophones.

PHONEME 1 PHONEME 2

ALLOPHONE 1 ALLOPHONE 1 OR 2 ALLOPHONE 2

This problem was discussed on the material of the Russian language. The first approach is called the morphological point of view. Let's take for example the Russian word ЛУГ( укр. Левада). The final phoneme is \г\ but in spoken Russian it's pronounced as \k\.

So \r\ lose it's distinctive feature of voice and it becames voiceless, but on the other hand there is such a Russian word as лук(укр. Цибуля) with the final phoneme \k\. The question is whether \k\ in the word “луг” and \k\ in the word “лук” is the same allophone. If it is means that in the phonological opposition \г-k\, \г\ loses it's distinctive feature and as a result the opposition disappear, such disappearance is called neutralization of the phonological opposition.

Now, this theory is called morphological opposition because we can reconstruct the phoneme \г\ if we change the morphemic structure of the word

Ex. Луг- луга ,на лугу

In the last 2 examples it is clear from the morphemic structure of the words that it is phoneme \г\but not\k\.

The second approach is called the phonological point of view. It's supported by both the Russian and British linguists. The proponents of this point of view state that a phoneme can not loose its distinctive feature. These scholars reject the notion of neutralization of phonological opposition. According to them, if an allophone loose its features it becomes an allophone of a different phoneme, so the allophone \k\ in “луг” is the allophone of the phoneme \k\, not of the phoneme \г\.

The third point of view boils down to this. There are abstract phonological unites higher than the phoneme. They are called archiphonemes. They combine the distinctive features of the 2 phonemes, in our case the distinctive features of both \k\ and \г\.