MAIN TRENDS IN
PHONEME THEORY
PHYSICAL VIEW
FUNCTIONAL VIEW
PHYSICAL VIEW
THE MATERIAL
ASPECT OF THE
PHONEME
A phoneme may be described roughly as a family of sounds
consistng of an important sound of the language (generally the
most frequently used member of that family) together with
other related sounds which 'take its place' in partcular soundsequences or under partcular conditons of length or stress or
intonaton.
– Daniel Jones,
“An Outline of English Phonetcs”
PHYSICAL VIEW
THE MATERIAL
ASPECT OF THE
PHONEME
A phoneme is a class of phonetcally similar sounds,
contrastng and mutually exclusive with all similar classes
in the language.
– B. Bloch and G. Trager
Lena cleans a pool.
[lʲi:nə klʲ˳i:nz ə pʰu:ɫ]
lʲ, lʲ˳, ɫ - members of the “family” of the phoneme /l/.
PHONETIC SIMILARITY:
ALVEOLAR
LATERAL
CONSONANT
PHONETIC CONTEXT:
LIGHT [l] – BEFORE VOWELS
DARK [ɫ] – BEFORE CONSONANTS
AND WORD-FINALLY
CRITISIZING
A phoneme is a mechanical sum of its allophones.
This defniton is vulgarly materialistc and metaphysical.
The phoneme cannot be defned as the sum total of all its
allophones, though it includes all of them.
TO SUM UP
A phoneme is a family of
related speech sounds.
Supporters: D. Jones,
B. Bloch, G. Trager
Based on the material aspect.
NO REGARD to functonal
and abstract aspects.
FUNCTIONAL VIEW
A phoneme is the minimal sound unit by which
meanings may be diferentated without much regard to
actually pronounced sounds. Meaning diferentaton is
taken to be a defning characteristc of phoneme.
___________________
A phoneme is a bundle of distnctve features.
R. JAKOBSON AND M. HALLE
DISTINCTIVE FEATURE THEORY
All features are privatve (i.e. binary).
There is a diference between phonetc and phonological features:
distnctve features are phonological.
phonetc features are surface realizatons of underlying phonological features.
A small set of features is able to diferentate between the phonemes of
any single language.
Distnctve features may be defned in terms of artculatory or acoustc
features.
DISTINCTIVE FEATURES
In 1956, Jakobson and Halle devised 12
distnctve features.
E.g., the phoneme /m/ might be represented
as a feature matrix
[+ sonorant]
[-contnuant]
[+voiced]
[+nasal]
[+labial]
vocalic
consonantal
compact
tense
voiced
nasal
discontnfuofus
strident
checked
grave
flat
sharp
non-vocalic
non-consonantal
diffuse
lax
voiceless
oral
contnfuant
mellow
funchecked
acfute
plain
plain
TO SUM UP
A phoneme is a bundle of
distnctve features.
Supporters: L. Bloomfeld,
R. Jakobson, M. Halle
Based on the functonal
aspect.
NO REGARD to material and
abstract aspects.
