The morphological approach

Moscow Phonological School
The linguists of the Moscow Phonological School represent the morphological approach to the problem of establishing the phonemic status of a sound in neutral position.
According to this 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 (i.e. in which it retains all its DFs).
The Moscow linguists are of the opinion that interchange of sounds shows close connection between Phonetics (the science of the sound system) and Morphology (which studies grammatical meanings).
Alternations take place in one and the same morpheme and reveal its phonemic structure. The phonemic content of the morpheme is constant according to the Moscow Phonological School.
The definition of the phoneme proposed by the Moscow Phonological School: "a functional phonetic unit represented by a row of positionally changing sounds".
The relations between different sounds representing one and the same phoneme are called interallophonic by the linguists of the Moscow School.
THE MOSCOW PHONOLOGICAL SCHOOLAnother scientific approach to the phoneme concept in Russia is known as the Moscowphonological school. This school is represented by R.I. Avanesov, V.N. Sidorov, A.A. Reformatsky(1901-1978), P.S. Kuznetzov (1899-1968), A.M. Sukhotin, M.V. Panov, N.F. Jakovlev. One of thefirst linguists to give a definition of phoneme void of psychologic elements was N.F. Jakovlev:«Phonemes are understood those phonic properties that can be analysed from the speech flow as theshortest elements serving to differentiate units of meaning.The representatives of the Moscow phonological school based their definition of a phoneme on theconcept of the morpheme. A.A. Reformatsky gave the following definition of the phoneme:«Phonemes are minimal units of the sound structure of a language, serving to form and differentiatemeaningful units: morphemes and words»2. Phonemes are meaningless units of a language but theyare capable of distinguishing meaningful units as their sequences may form morphemes and words.For example,pit - litetc.