I. Conceptions that pay special attention to the abstract aspect.
According to mentalistic and psychological view, the phoneme is an ideal mental image, it doesn’t exist objectively, it exists only in the mind of the speaker. Actual speech sounds are imperfect realization of it. These ideals were expressed by Baudauin de Courtenay and by Sommerfelt.
II. Conception that can be called “functional” because special focus is given to the ability of the phoneme to differentiate the meaning.
Scholars are particularly interested in relevant or distinctive features of the phoneme, while non-distinctive features are often ignored. This view was shared by Трубецкой, Якобсон and Bloomfield. The great achievement of these scholars was that it gave rise to phonology as a linguistic discipline. However, it resulted in the separation of phonetics (физическая сторона) and phonology (речевая сторона).
The aim of phonology is the study of the system of distincted features and meaningful aspect of the phoneme. Phonetics was limited to the description of physiological and acoustic characteristics of speech sounds without reference to their linguistic function. The scholars claimed only phonology was a linguistic discipline, while phonetics should belong to biology. Thus we can say that the material aspect of the phoneme was ignored within this approach.
III. The group concerned with the material aspect.
The physical view represented by Daniel Jones and B.Bloch regards the phoneme as the family of related sounds. In other words the phoneme is a mechanical sum of its allophones. So, similarity between sounds is considered to be the main criterion for attributing them to a particular phoneme. We see that the representatives of this approach ignore the abstract and functional aspect of the phoneme.
This brief overview of the approaches demonstrate that the definition given by Щерба is definitely a comprehensive one because it gives equal importance to all the three aspects of the phoneme: material, abstract, functional.
Methods of Phonological Analysis
Before we speak about methods of phonological analysis we should formulate why the phonological investigation is conducted, what the aim of phonological analysis is:
1) to establish distinctive difference between sounds, that is to establish relevant features;
2) to create the inventory of the phonemes and establish the phonemic system of a language.
Generally speaking, the final aim of the phonological analysis is the identification of the phonemes (1) and their classification (2).
There are two approaches to the phonological analysis:
1. Distributional approach was practiced by American linguists and focuses on the position of the sound in the word or its distribution.
2. Semantic method attaches special importance to meaning. It is widely used in Russia. The semantic analysis is performed through the system of phonological oppositions. It is based on the following fundamental phonological rule: Phonemes can distinguish the meaning when opposed to one another in the same phonetic context.
ship [ɪ] – sheep [iː], day [d] – they [ð]
So, to establish the phonemic status of the sound it is necessary to oppose one sound to some other in the same phonetic context. This procedure is called “commutation test”. We must find or establish the so-called minimal pairs. A minimal pair is a pair of words which differ in one sound only. So, we replace one sound by another and try to find out if the opposed sounds belong to the same or different phonemes. The commutation test may have three possible results:
#1. [pin] – [sin]
The meaning is different, so the opposed sounds [p/s] belong to different phonemes.
#2. [pin] – [phin]
The meaning is the same, so the opposed sounds belong to the same phoneme. Here the allophone is different, used wrongly.
#3. [phin] – [hin]
We have a meaningless word [hin], so we cannot make any conclusion about the phonemic status of the second sound. We can’t identify it.