8. The Leningrad school of linguistics and its contribution to the development of the phoneme theory

The St. Petersburg (Leningrad) school of linguistics was headed by L.V. Shcherba, whose research work may be subdivided into two periods:

1. pre-revolutionary period;

In the first period of his research work L.V. Shcherba was under the influence of J.A. Baudouin de Courtenay. His approach to the phoneme is also psychological in character. The phoneme is defined as the shortest generic phonetical perception in a given language capable of being associated with semantic perceptions, of distinguishing words, and of being easily isolated from a word.

So L.V. Shcherba considers phonemes as “generic perceptions”. Moreover, he was the first, to advance the idea of the distinctive function of phoneme.

The principal points of L.V. Shcherba’s phoneme theory are:

1) the theory of phonemic variants;

2) the theory of phonemic independence.

L.V. Shcherba attaches very great importance to phonemic variants because they represent phonemes in actual speech, and the whole groups of phonemic variants give rise to the same type perception. On the one hand, phonemic variants may develop into new phonemes; on the other hand, a phoneme may cease to function as such, and may become a phonemic variant. Thus L.V. Shcherba claims that it is essential for historical phonetic investigations to trace the development of certain phonemic variants into independent phonemes, as well as the deterioration of some phonemes into phonemic variants.

According to L.V. Shcherba phonemes have a certain amount of independence which can be proved in two ways:

The first proof is the fact that a phoneme is capable of expressing a meaning by itself. For instance, [∫] in many languages commands silence.

The second proof is the fact that elements of semantic perceptions are often associated with elements of sound perceptions. For example, the non-palatalized [л] in many Russian verbs such as “хотел”, “смотрел”, etc. is associated with the idea of the Past Tense.

2) post-revolutionary period.

In the second period of his work L.V. Shcherba revised his phoneme conception and worked out a materialistic theory of phoneme. He stated that in actual speech we utter a much greater variety of sounds than we are aware of; in every language these sounds are united in a comparatively small number of sound types. Thus phonemes can be defined as sound types, limited in number which are capable of distinguishing the meaning and the form of words, thus serving the purpose of social intercourse. The various sounds that we actually utter and which are the individual representing the universal are phonemic variants. He was the first who regarded the phoneme as a real independent distinctive unit which manifests itself in the form of its variants.

L.R. Zinder, the follower of L.V. Shcherba, developed his theory of phonemic independence. He advanced the following considerations to prove that a phoneme has an independent existence:

1. A phoneme is a phonetic unit, as being expressed in actual speech in the form of a number of variants, it is very complex from the acoustic and the physiological points of view.

2. Everyone is able to recognize phonemes in his mother tongue.

3. We recognize sounds of our mother tongue in unfamiliar or invented words.

4. We are able to construct borrowed words by means of the phonemes of our mother tongue.

5. We can create in our mother tongue the new words which are not connected morphologically with already existing words

6. Everyone can analyze into phonemes any words of his mother tongue, taken separately, without any context, which is done everyday when we repeat new words, names of unfamiliar objects or of people.

7. A word is analyzed phonemically without comparing it with other words or with other forms of the same word that is to say without finding oppositions for it.