The American Phonological School.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1424.

The London Phonological School.

It is headed by Prof. D. Jones of London and is concerned with the physical conception of the phoneme. His views are expressed in a number of works. According to him a phoneme is defined as “ a family of sounds in a given language which are related in character and are used in such a way that no one member ever occurs in a word in the same phonetic context as any other member”. He breaks up the phoneme into atoms and considers different features of a phoneme as independent phenomena. He distinguishes tones and tonemes in tone languages, strones and stronemes as different degrees of stress, chrones and chronemes as different length of vowels.His aim is to give a phoneme a purely practical application.

The American phonological school is headed by L.Bloomfield and E. Sapir. Their approach of the phoneme theory is synchronic. They treat the linguistic phenomena from the point of view of structuralism-“ pattern is habit, behavior is culture”. They compare linguistic processes with a fire in a wooden stove , they are invisible. One can judge about what is going on within by an individual's behavior. The system of the language may be compared with any system of signs, for example, with Morse code.