The topicality of the work

CHAPTER 1. The Functional Aspect of Speech Sounds

1.1 Phoneme

In connected speech a sound is generally modified by its phonetic environment, (i.e. by the neighboring sounds), by the position it occupies in a word or an utterance; it is also modified by prosodic features, such as stress, speech melody, & tempo of speech. Every language has a limited number of sound types which are shared by all the speakers of the language & are linguistically important bec. they distinguish words in the language. In English there are 20 vowel phonemes & 24 consonant phonemes. Some linguists consider the phoneme to be but an abstraction & deny its material character. This viewpoint is expressed by linguists of the Prague Phonological School, for whom a phoneme is but an abstract concept. Other linguists overestimate the material, real & objective character of the phoneme. D. Jones considers a phoneme to be a family of sounds; others consider it to be a class of sounds.

The phoneme has 3 main linguistic functions: the constitutive, the distinctive, & the indentificatory function. Though the phonemes themselves, in isolation, have no meaning, they are linguistically important, since, in their material form they constitute morphemes, words, all of which are meaningful. Hence, the constitutive function of the phoneme. The phoneme performs the distinctive function, because phonemes distinguish one word from another.

The phoneme has the recognitive function as well, because native speakers identify definite combinations of phonemes as meaningful ling-c units (words, word combinations, or phrases). When identifying linguistic units the use of the right phoneme is not the only significant factor, the use of the right allophone is not much less important.“The linguistic aspect of speech sounds is also known as their functional or social aspect. When sounds are regarded from the functional point of view we call them phonemes. The branch of phonetics which investigates them as units which serve people for communicative purposes is called phonology. The key terms of phonology are a phoneme and an allophone.

“Phoneme” is used to mean “sound” in its contrastive sense.

“Allophone” is used for sounds which are variants of a phoneme. .”⁴

The phonemes of a language form a system of oppositions, in which any one phoneme is usually opposed to any other phoneme in at least one position in at least one lexical or grammatical minimal or sub-minimal pair. If the substitution of one sound for another results in the change of meaning, the commuted sounds are different phonemes, speech sounds which are phonologically significant.

"The founder of the phoneme theory was I.A. Baudouin de Courteney, the Russian scientist of Polish origin. His theory of phoneme was developed and perfected by L.V. Shcherba — the head of the Leningrad linguistic school, who stated that in actual speech we utter a much greater variety of sounds than we are aware of, and that in every language these sounds are united in a comparatively small number of sound types, which are capable of distinguishing the meaning and the form of words; that is they serve the purpose of social intercommunication. It is these sound types that should be included into the classification of phonemes and studied as differentiatory units of the language. The actually pronounced speech sounds are variants, or allophones of phonemes. Allophones are realized in concrete words. They have phonetic similarity, that is their acoustic and articulatory features have much in common, at the same they differ in some degree and are incapable of differentiating words. For example, in speech we pronounce not the sound type /t/, which is alveolar, forelingual, apical, occlusive, plosive, voiceless-fortis — according to the classificatory definition, but one of its variants, e.g. labialised in the word twice, dental in the word eighth, post-alveolar in try, exploded nasally in written, exploded laterally in little, pronounced without aspiration in stay, etc. Another example: the sound type, or the vowel phoneme /i:/, which is defined as "unrounded, fully front, high, narrow, tense, free", is more back in key, than in eat under the influence of the backlingual /k/, it is longer before a voiced lenis, than before a voiceless fortis consonant: seed — seat, greed — greet, etc.”⁵ The phoneme is a minimal abstract linguistic unit realized in speech in the form of speech sounds opposable to other phonemes of the same language to distinguish the meaning of phonemes and words.

"The phoneme can be considered from the point of view of its three aspects. Firstly, the phoneme is a functional unit, that is, the role of the various components of the phonetic system of the language in distinguishing one morpheme from another, one word from another or also one phrase from another. The opposition of phonemes serves to distinguish the meaning of morphemes and words: E.g. said - says, bath-path, light - like and the whole phrase: E.g. He was heard badly. - He was hurt badly.

Secondly, the phoneme is material, real, and objective. That means that it is realize in speech of all English speaking people in the form of speech sounds, its allophones. The set of speech sounds (the allophones belonging to the same phoneme) are not identical in their articulation through there remains some phonetic similarity between them:

E.g. [d] in isolation is plosive, forelingual, alveolar, voiced. But: - it is slightly palatalized before front vowels and sonorant [j] e.g. day, did;

- is pronounced without any plosion before another plosive e.g. bedtime, bad pain;

- is pronounced with nasal plosion before nasal sonorants [n] and [m] e.g. sudden, admit;

- followed by posed-alveolar [r] it also becomes post-alveolar e.g. dry, dream.

These modifications of the phoneme [d] are quite sufficient to demonstrate the articulatory difference between its allophones. Consequently, through allophones of the same phoneme possess similar articulatory features they may frequently show considerable phonetic differences.

Thirdly, allophones of the same phoneme, no matter how different their articulation may be, function as the same linguistic unit. The question arises why phonetically native speakers seldom observe differences between the allophones of the same phoneme. The reason is that the phonemes have an important function in the language, they differentiate words; allophones have no such functions, they occur in different positions in the word.

In speech the phoneme serves to perform three functions:

a) constitutive, because sounds constitute words, phrases and sentences;

b) distinctive, because sounds help to distinguish them;

- c) recognitive, that is, its allophones help to recognize words, phrases and

sentences."⁶ The PhonemeThe most comprehensive definition of the phoneme was first introduced by the Russian linguist L. V. Shcherba.The concise form of this definition could be: The phoneme is a minimal abstract linguistic unit realized in speech in the form of speech sounds opposable to other phonemes of the same language to distinguish the meaning of morphemes and words. According to this definition the phoneme is a unity of three aspects: material, abstract and functional. ⁷ 

S. Solijonov also said that functional aspect of speech sound are very essensial point of phonetics. " We know that the phonic medium can be studied from four point of view: the articulatory, the acoustic, the auditory, and the functional. The most important aspect is the phonological one. The theoretical study which steps up to account all the phonetic distinction of a language is called phonology. The segmental phoneme is the smallest language unit that exists in the speech of all members of a given language community. They are capable to distinguish words and grammatical forms. Phoneme is a minimal segmental unit and it can not be divided into other smallest units. It is impossible to pronounce the same sount in the same way in many times”.⁸ It is obvious that phoneme is the smallest unit and it help to differentiate other units. In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme /ˈfoʊniːm/ is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a particular language.

For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west of England,[1] the sound patterns /sɪn/ (sin) and /sɪŋ/ (sing) are two separate words that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, /n/, for another phoneme, /ŋ/. Two words like this that differ in meaning through the contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair. If, in another language, any two sequences differing only by pronunciation of the final sounds [n] or [ŋ] are perceived as being the same in meaning, then these two sounds are interpreted as phonetic variants of a single phoneme in that language.

Phonemes that are established by the use of minimal pairs, such as tap vs tab or pat vs bat, are written between slashes: /p/, /b/. To show pronunciation, linguists use square brackets: [pʰ] (indicating an aspirated p in pat).

There are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic (or phonematic) terms. However, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech sounds (phones) that are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, the English k sounds in the words kill and skill are not identical (as described below), but they are distributional variants of a single phoneme /k/. Speech sounds that differ but do not create a meaningful change in the word are known as allophones of the same phoneme. Allophonic variation may be conditioned, in which case a certain phoneme is realized as a certain allophone in particular phonological environments, or it may otherwise be free, and may vary by speaker or by dialect. Therefore, phonemes are often considered to constitute an abstract underlying representation for segments of words, while speech sounds make up the corresponding phonetic realization, or the surface form. " The notion of the phoneme counts as a break-through of modern theoretical linguistics in the early twentieth century. It paved the way for descriptions of distinctive features at different levels in linguistics. Although it has since then had a turbulent existence across altering theoretical positions, it remains a powerful concept of a fundamental unit in spoken language. At the same time, its conceptual status remains highly unclear. The present article aims to clarify the status of the concept of 'phoneme' in psycholinguistics, based on the scientific concepts of description, understanding and explanation. Theoretical linguistics has provided mainly descriptions. The ideas underlying this article are, first, that these descriptions may not be directly relevant to psycholinguistics and, second, that psycholinguistics in this sense is not a sub-discipline of theoretical linguistics. Rather, these two disciplines operate with different sets of features and with different orientations when it comes to the scientific concepts of description, understanding and explanation."⁹