Writan write

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 431.

Tima time

Ic I

O.E. Mid.E.

We can see that the traditional connection between the sound shape and the meaning is not absolute and within certain meaning limits the sound changes do not effect the meaning of the word. If the limits are broken we can get either a new meaning or a sound shape without any meaning at all.

From the above mentioned consideration we can make a conclusion that there exist speech sounds on which the sense differentiation is based. The Russian scientist L.V.Scherbacalled such sounds phonemes. In his book “French Phonetics” he writes:” In actual speech we utter a much greater variety of sounds than we are actually aware of; in any language these sounds are united into a comparatively small number of sound types which are capable of distinguishing the meaning and the form of words, that is them that serve the purposes of social intercourse. It is these sound types that we have in mind when discussing speech sounds. Such sound types should be called “phonemes”.

Academician L.V.Scherbawas not the first to use the term ‘phoneme'. For the first time it was used in 1858 by the French linguist Ave who used it to distinguish speech sounds from any other sounds produced in nature.

After him the Russian scientist of Polish origin I.A.Baudouin de Courteney developed it into the phoneme theory. During the first stage of the development of his theory he considered a phoneme to be a component of the morpheme and tried to analyze phonemes according to their function in the morphemes. He came to the conclusion that the phoneme is represented in speech in the form of numeral acoustic variants. He centered his attention on the historical alternations but his phoneme conception was obscure because he did not take into consideration the sense differentiating function of the phoneme.

Later Baudouin de Courteney changed his views under the influence of the psychological approach to linguistics. He abandoned his morphological conception of the phoneme and tried to investigate it in the sphere of sociology. According to his opinion a phoneme is an idea of the sound which arises in the mind of a speaker before he utters a word. In other words, he considered a phoneme as a complex perception of the articulatory movements and muscularsensationsconnected between each other and resulting acoustic impressions, all of which react on the individual's mind simultaneously.

His theory of phoneme was developed and perfected by L.V.Scherba – the head of the Leningrad linguistic school, who overcame the psychological approach and created a scientifically grounded phoneme theory. He was the first to attach importance to sense differentiating function of the phoneme and also focus his attention on the variations of the phoneme – allophones. According to L.V.Scherba the phoneme can be viewed as a functional, material and abstract unit. These three aspects of the phoneme are concentrated in the definition of the phoneme suggested by V.A.Vassilyev: ”The segmental phoneme is the smallest language unit that exists in speech of all the members of a given language community as such speech sounds which are capable of distinguishing one word of the same language or one grammatical form of a word from another grammatical form of the same word”.

The only drawback of this definition is that it is too long and complicated for practical use. The concise form of it could be: