Библиографические сокращения

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V. B. Kasevič phonological problems in general and oriental linguistics

Summary

Preface. The object of this monograph is twofold: first it intends to give a broad outline of a phonological theory that would integrate both relevant ideas of ‘classical’ phonology and process-oriented principles dominating present-day phonology and phonetics; second, it is concerned with the specific phonological nature of Far Eastern and South East Asian languages and with the place the latter occupy in an overall phonological typology.

Introduction. Language is a functional system whose raison d’être is to make communication possible. The nature of all the language units is directly determined by the role they play in the processes of the formation and transmittance of information. That means that to «discover» the unobservable abstract units of a language an analyst resorts to equating the observable speech elements on the basis of their identical behaviour in the processes of meaning-communication.

The rules of language, as discovered by linguists, are of a somewhat different logical nature: these are arrived at by advancing certain hypotheses and checking them against their «generating adequacy».

Chapter 1: Phonemic system: Discovery procedures. The initial step of phonemic analysis is a hypothetical segmentation of a text into minimal phonological units (phones) with its subsequent verification and, if necessary, a revision. There are two basic procedures in phonological segmentation: (1) determining phonological boundaries according to morphological ones, (2) comparing segments which are morphologically unanalysable with those analysable: if the former display certain distributional, phonetic or other similarity to the latter they may be as well considered phonemic clusters.

The notion of opposition is analysed. Both distributional, commutational and semantic definitions of the notion are rejected. The fundamental function of the phoneme is not distinctive but rather constitutive, the distinctive function being a mere corollary of the latter. That means, among other things, that an analyst’s primary concern should be with equating (identifying) phones rather than with opposing them. The equating of phones is based on their automatic interchange within an allomorph. Non-alternating or «ambiguously» alternating phones are included into corresponding equivalence sets on the basis of various subsidiary criteria, mostly of psycholinguistic nature. The latter may be exemplified by a perennial issue in Russian phonology — the question of final voiceless non-sonorants; these are found phonologically voiceless on the basis, among other things, of their behaviour in an experiment where preschool children were asked to «palindromize» words like jad /jat/ ‘poison’ which resulted in /taj/, not /daj/.

Phonemes are abstract units corresponding to equivalence sets of phones. Opposition is a relation of antiequivalence holding between any two equivalence sets and, as a result, between any two phonemes.

The chapter also analyses the so-called formal and natural brands of (generative) phonology and shows fundamental flaws in their approach to phonological problems. _/293//294/

Chapter 2: Syllables. Three kinds of syllables are postulated: unstable surface syllables which are not purely phonological entities, being influenced by various morphological and other factors, e. g. [s’e‑stra], [s’es‑tra], [s’est‑ra] ‘sister’; deep consonantal syllables, e. g., [s’e‑sъ‑tъ‑ra]; deep vocalic syllables, i. e. vowel intervals or, in other words, rhythmic structures with identified vowels, e. g., [‑e‑a].

Chapter 3: Syllabic languages. Syllabic languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Burmese and the like) are distinguishable by two diagnostic features: non-occurrence of non-syllabic morphemes and non-occurrence of a re-syllabification, e. g. Viet. [kak⁵] + [a¹] → [kak⁵a¹], not *[ka⁵ka¹]. The two features, when both present, lead to a functional unsegmentability of the syllable, making the latter a special phonological unit — the syllabeme. The claim is substantiated by functional linguistic and experimental data (speaking under delayed auditory feedback, speech perception in white noise, etc.).

Chapter 4: A typology of phonological systems. The proposed typology is based upon a differentiation of 5 classes: purely syllabic languages (supposedly exemplified by Proto-Indo-European), syllabic languages, nearly syllabic languages (Mon-Khmer), nearly non-syllabic languages (Indonesian), non-syllabic languages (Mod. Indo-European).

Chapter 5: Prosodics. Two major ‘subintonational’ prosodemes are tone and accent. Tones are characteristic of monosyllabic languages; the primary unit of monosyllabic languages is the syllabomorpheme, prosodically marked by tone. Accents are characteristic of ‘lexemic’ languages where the primary unit is the word, prosodically marked by accent. A ‘co-existence’ of tone and accent is at least not typical and seems to indicate a transitional state of the phonological and morphological systems in question.

Chapter 6: Phonological aspects of speech activity and language aquisition. Both speech production and speech perception are multi-level processes. All the levels involved are chiaracterizable in terms of the units associated with them. Not only speech production but also speech perception and language aquisilion are ‘from-top-to-botlom processes’: man invariably starts by operating with most abstract features pertaining to higher-level entities and then proceeds to determine their more precise characteristics, thus breaking them down into certain lower-level units. The usual ‘from-top-to-bottom’ process of speech perception may be cut short at any point if redundancy makes fine analysis unnecessary. A set of phonological entities brought into play at each of the levels is provisionally described in the chapter.

Chapter 7: Phonological component and its levels. The chapter gives a summary of the principal results arrived at in the previous sections of the book. It is argued that phonology is not, as commonly believed, the lowest level of language and speech — at least not in the sense of a mechanical ‘addition’ of sound characteristics to ‘ready-made’ abstract structures. Phonology is rather a separate component with its own levels correlative to the semantic and grammalic levels of language. Thus, ‘emotive’ intonemes are correlative to deep semantics, communicative intonemes are mostly related to sentence types, rhythmic structures realized as deep syllables sequences are related to (phonetic) words while phonemes and syllabemes are associated with morphemes.