Final Assessment Questions on “Theoretical phonetics” Card-1 Connection of Phonetics with Other Sciences

Card-2
1.The Prague Phonological School.
The Prague school was best known for its work on phonology. Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius. The fundamental scientific works have been done by the representatives of the Prague phonological school - well-known linguists W. Matezius, B. Havranek, N.S.Trubetzkoy, B. Trnka, I. Vachek, V. Skalichka and.otbers. Among them very important phonological ideas were advanced by the Russian scholar N.S. Trubetzkoy. In his book «Principles of Phonology» first published in German in 1939, N.S. Trubetzkoy discussed the relation of phonology to other studies, the nature of phonemes and their variants, how to determine the phonemes of a language, relations between phonemes in general analysis and in particular languages, the classification of phonological and non-phonological oppositions, neutralization, mono- and biphonemic combinations, phonological statistics.
2.Phonological trends in the USA.
There are several phonological trends in the USA. The head of the American descriptive linguistics L.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. 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.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.