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

CHAPTER I PHONOLOGICAL SCHOOLS IN LINGUISTICS

I.1. Baudouin De Courtenay’s theory of phonology

The formation of the phonological theory can be divided into two periods:

1. 
   The “pre-phoneme” period, i.e. when there was no dis­tinction between “speech sound” and “phoneme” until 1870;
   
2. 
   The “phonemic” period, which began in 1870 and in­cluded the twentieth century. In this period, the basic phonetic and phonological terms and concepts were proposed, and the distinc­tion between the actually pronounced speech sounds and the pho­nemes as functional units of the language was recognized. The first linguist to point out this distinction was I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), an outstanding Russian and Polish scholar.
   

Bedouin De Courtenay defined the phoneme as the “psychological equivalent of the speech sound”. However, he was aware of the fact that acoustic and motor images of the speech sound do not correspond to each other. I. A. Baudouin de Cour­tenay also tried to analyze phonemes on the bases of phonetic alternations in morphemes. Besides psychological and morphological definitions of the phoneme, he could propose the distinctive function of the speech sound in notions as he consid­ered that words may be realized in notions. I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay repeatedly stated that semantically the utterance breaks up into sentences, sentences into significative words, words into morphological components or morphemes and morphemes into phonemes. As a morpheme is only divided into components of the same nature as itself: these components - phonemes must also be significative.

He admitted the division of morphemes into physical or physiological elements to be unjustified in linguistic analysis¹. He criticized N. V. Krushevsky's conception of this problem. Inci­dentally, N. V. Krushevsky, was one of his students who introduced the term “phoneme” at the same time as F. de Saussure, an emi­nent Swiss linguist did. I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay's fundamen­tal ideas had a great influence on the development of later phonological theories both in our country and abroad. In early phonological works many linguists defined the phoneme as “sound image”, “conscious sound image”, “sound intent” (N. S. Trubetzkai), and also as the sum of acoustic impressions and of articulatory movements (F. de Saussure) but none of them sug­gested any other to substitute the term “phoneme”. Nevertheless, A. Baudouin de Courtenay's psychological interpretation of the phoneme concept could not lead to an obliteration of the bound­ary between sound and phoneme; it was merely a terminological mixture of psychological and linguistic concepts, which greatly in­fluenced each other in that period. Many interesting ideas stating linguistic functions of speech sounds may be found in his works. He showed the articulatory - acoustic, morphological and seman­tic aspects of sound material and their relationship. I.A. Bau­douin De Courtenay's idea of the distinctive-semantic function of speech sound was very important in relation to the modem theory of distinctive features of the phoneme, according to which the phoneme of a given language may be divided from a system of sequences, which is formed by their constituents, i.e. by distinctive features. As the morphemes may be divided into phonemes, like­wise phonemes are divided into distinctive features, which are in­terpreted in either articulatory or acoustic terms. In spite of the various approaches to the problem of establishing an inventory of the phonemes in a given language, which should be possible on the basis of breaking up utterances or words into the smallest segments or by the method of commutation test, counting mini­mal pairs of words like : /pill – bill/, /till – mill/, /kill – hill/ etc.

The fundamental discussion on the problems of phonemic analysis is still going on among phonemicists.