The identification of the phonemic inventory for each individual language

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 586.

Function of the phoneme

Aspects of the phoneme and their critical analysis

The phoneme can therefore be regarded as a dialectal unity of its 2 aspects: the material & the abstracted aspects. None of these aspects of the phoneme can be neglected or disregarded. That is the materialistic view of the phoneme.Some linguists consider the phoneme to be but an abstraction & deny its material character. This viewpoint is expressed by linguists of the Prague Phonological School, for whom a phoneme is but an abstract concept. Other linguists overestimate the material, real & objective character of the phoneme. D. Jones considers a phoneme to be a family of sounds; others consider it to be a class of sounds.

The phoneme has 3 main linguistic functions: the constitutive, the distinctive, & the indentificatory function. Though the phonemes themselves, in isolation, have no meaning, they are linguistically important, since, in their material form they constitute morphemes, words, all of which are meaningful. Hence, the constitutive function of the phoneme. The phoneme performs the distinctive function, because phonemes distinguish one word from another.

The second problem of phonological analysis is the identification of the inventory of distinctive features on which all the phonological oppositions in the 1anguage are based.

Every sound is characterized by a number of features, not all of which are equally important for communication. If one compares some of the allophones of /p/, it appears that all of them have common features & features which characterize only a few of them. The problem is to decide which of the features of a group of common sounds in a certain 1anguage are phonologically relevant & which of them are irrelevant.