- •American structuralism
- •The English Phonetic School
- •The problem of neutralization. The Moscow Phonological School.
- •The problem of neutralization. The leningrad Phonological School.
- •The copenhagen linguistic school. Copenhagen structuralism
- •Syllabic structure of english words
- •Theories of syllable formation
- •The parts of speech
- •The noun
- •The category of number
- •The category of case
- •The category of gender
- •The verb
- •Classifications of English verbs
- •The category of person and number
- •The category of tense
- •The category of voice
- •The category of aspect
- •The category of time correlation
- •The word group (phrase, word combination)
- •1. According to the morphological status of its components:
- •3. Phrases can be:
- •The sentence
- •Different approaches to the study of the sentence
American structuralism
L. Bloomfield, W. Twaddel, B. Bloch, Ch. Hockett, Z. Harris
L. Bloomfield: phoneme is a bunch (or cluster) of distinctive features.
W. Twaddel (fictionalist view): phoneme is an abstractional unit, a scientific fiction.
B. Bloch, Ch. Hockett, Z. Harris (materialistic view): phoneme is a class of phonetically similar sounds, contrasting with all similar classes in the language; the phoneme is a mechanical sum of its allophones.
2 laws of phonemic and allophonic distribution:
1. Allophones of different phonemes always occur in the same phonetic context;
2. Consequently, the allophones of the same phoneme (with the exception of its free variants) never occur in the same phonetic context and always occur in different positions.
2 conclusions come from these laws:
1. If more or less different speech sounds occur in the same phonetic context, they should be allophones of different phonemes (= contrastive distribution);
2. If more or less similar speech sounds occur in different positions and never occur in the same phonetic context, they are variants of one and the same phoneme (=complementary distribution).
Thus the phonemic status of a sound can be established even without knowing the meaning of words, that is only on the basis of the distribution of sounds in it. This is the purely distributional method of identifying phonemes.
The English Phonetic School
D. Jones: phoneme is a family of sounds, and the members of this family show phonetic similarity. No member of one family can occur in the same context as any other member of this family.
The problem of neutralization. The Moscow Phonological School.
R.I. Avanesov, A.A. Reformatsky, V.N. Sidorov, P.S. Kuznetsov and others.
Cases of neutralization – when it is necessary to state the phonemic status of a sound in neutral position (i.e. in words and their grammatical forms in which the phonemes lose their distinctive function due to the neutralization of a phonemic opposition resulting from the loss of a minimal DF by one member of the opposition).
Problem: to establish the phonemic status of a sound in neutral position.
Decision: morphological approach (to establish the status of a sound in a phonologically neutral position, one should find an allomorph of the same morpheme in which the phoneme under question occurs in the strong position).
Phoneme is dependent on morpheme.
Phonetic row (R. Avanesov) – a phonetic unit which is represented by a row of sounds changing according to their positions.
Hyperphoneme – a phoneme in a strong position.
The problem of neutralization. The leningrad Phonological School.
L.V. Shcherba, L.R. Zinder, M.I. Matusevitch and others.
Cases of neutralization – when it is necessary to state the phonemic status of a sound in neutral position (i.e. in words and their grammatical forms in which the phonemes lose their distinctive function due to the neutralization of a phonemic opposition resulting from the loss of a minimal DF by one member of the opposition).
Problem: to establish the phonemic status of a sound in neutral position.
Decision: non-morphological approach, the autonomous approach to the phoneme: the autonomy of the phoneme and its independence from the morpheme (different allomorphs of a morpheme may differ from each other not only in their allophonic, but also in their phonemic composition).
The archiphoneme theory (elaborated by N.S. Trubetzkoy):
Archiphoneme is a combination of distinctive features common to two phonemes; or in other words, the archiphoneme consists of the shared (common) DFs of two or more phonemes but it excludes the feature which distinguishes them.
Many linguists share the approach to the phoneme status suggested by acad. L.V. Shcherba: "… 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 which are capable of distinguishing the meaning and the form of words; that is, they serve the purpose of social intercourse. It is these sound types that we have in mind when discussing speech sounds. Such sound types will be called phonemes. The various sounds that we actually utter and which are the individual representing of the universal (the phoneme), will be called phonemic variants" [Щерба 1963: 19].