Content s introduction Chapter I phonological schools in linguistics and their theoretical concepts

1.5 Phonological Trends in the USA

There are several phonological trends in the USA. The head of the American descriptive linguistics Bloomfield was one of the first phonologists whose ideas were very fruitful in the further develop­ment of phonological theories in USA. Another well-known American linguist E. Sapir also formulated his own approach to phonemic solu­tions. Below we give a short review of phonological trends in the USA.

Bloomfieldian descriptive phonology is also called the relative-acoustic theory, as it is based on the analyses of structural functions and acoustic features of phonemes. According to L. Bloomfield, a phoneme is a minimal distinctive unit of a language, which has no meaning itself but may be determined as a special unit, owing to its physical and structural contrasts in relation to all other sounds types of a particular language. His other definition of the phoneme as a mini­mal unit of the phonetic feature is purely a phonetic one. He some­times mixed up the notions of a “speech sound” and a “phoneme”. His idea on the primary and secondary phonemes was very important in the further classification of segmental and suprasegmental phonemes. He also gave descriptions of the phoneme combinations in initial, me­dial and final positions of the words.

L. Bloomfield’s theory was developed and improved by a num­ber of linguists and is called the post-Bloomfieldian theory of de­scriptive phonology. The representatives of this are Z. Harris, Ch. F. Hockett, H. A. Gleason. According to this theory a phoneme is a class of sound or a class of allophones (phones) which have both pho­netic similarity and functional identity, in the sense that the substitu­tion of one for another in the same context does not change its syntactic or semantic function, i.e. makes no change in its meaning. This theory defines a phoneme on the basis of the distributional method. Usually the phoneme is defined as the representative of phones in free variation or complementary distribution, which are phoneti­cally similar. The allophones of phonemes may also be determined on the basis of the distributional method. Some representatives of this trend define a phoneme as a sum of distinctive features. They state the physical and functional aspects of the phoneme from the centralistic point of view, as their theory is based on the stimulus-response seg­ments that are the same or different.