The theory of the phoneme in foreign phonological schools

The founder of the phoneme theory was Baudouin de Courtenay, the Russian scientist of Polish origin. Then it was developed by Shcherba, the head of the Leningrad linguistic school. But many foreign schools have been also interested in this question.

1. FERDINAND DE SASUR, the Swiss linguist. He viewed phonemes as the sum of acoustic impressions and articulatory movements. He regarded the phoneme independent of the phonetic properties. This conception is called abstractional.

2. THE FUNCTIONAL CONCEPTION 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 characteristic of phonemes, thus the absence of palatalisation in [dark l] and palat-on in [clear l] in English do not differentiate meanings and therefore cannot be assigned to dif. phonemes, but both form allophones of the phoneme /l/. The same articulatory features of Russian [л],[л’] do differentiate meanings and must be assigned to different phonemes in Russian. Ex., мол-моль, лог-лёг, дол-доля. This view is shared by Trubetskoy (the head of the Prague Linguistic School), Bloomfield, Jakobson.

3. THE PHYSICAL CONCEPTION was originated by Daniel Jones, the head of the London School of Phonology. He defined the phoneme as a family of sounds. The members of the family must show phonetic similarity to one another, in other words be related in character. No member of the family can occur in the same phonetic context as any other member. This view was shared by the American scientists Bloch and Trager. They define the phoneme as a class of phonetically similar sounds, contrasting and mutually exclusive (взаимоисключающий) with all similar classes in the language. This approach may seem to be vulgarly materialistic since it views the phoneme as a group of articulatory similar sounds without any regard to its functional and abstract aspects.