Н. С. Трубецкой. Основы фонологии

Н. С. Трубецкой. Основы фонологии

N.S. Trubetskoy was a Russian linguist whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology. Actually, he revised and extended the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure and Baudouin de Courtenay. The result is his own phonological theory. The development of the conventional  ideas has led to the distinction between phonetics and phonology. Also, he worked out the main subject of phonology - the concept of phonological opposition.(1 слайд)

In the preface Trubetskoy dwells upon the differentiation between phonetics - the study of the material form of speech sounds which deals with speech itself- and phonology – the study of language sounds connected directly to a language. The differentiation is based on the existence of distinctive and indistinctive oppositions. But not all linguists agree with his idea as some of them don’t even distinguish the speech and the language as two separate entities. (2 слайд)

Phoneticians, as Trubetskoy says, deal with the flow of speech. In this case there can’t be any correlation between speech sounds and the meaning. At the same time, phonologists study how the differences of speech sounds are related to the change of meaning and the rules of their combination. That’s why a phonologist takes into account only those relevant features of a sound that perform the considerable function in the system of a language. (3 слайд)

There are three aspects in sounds: expression, address, message. The sphere of phonology includes only the third, representative aspect – message. A representative aspect perfoms 3 functions: 1) `culminating (indicating the number of units (words, phrases) presented in a sentence); 2) de`limitative (indicating the boundary between two units: word combinations, words, morphemes); 3) dis`tinctive (the most important function for phonology, it promotes the distinction of meaningful units). (4 слайд)

The concept of phonological opposition

The sound oppositions which can differentiate the meanings of 2 words of a particular language are called phonological. Others which can’t perfom this function are considered to be phonologically irrelevant (indistinctive). The sounds can be divided into interchangeable (which occur in the same sound environment and are able to form both distinctive and indistinctive oppositions) and mutually exclusive (which, on the contrary, don’t occur in the same sound environment thus being unable to form a distinctive opposition). (5 cлайд)

Each member of the this opposition is called a phonological unit and if a phonological unit can’t be divided into smaller parts it’s called a phoneme and it contains phonologically relevant features. And if the same phoneme is implemented/realized in different sounds, they are called variants which may be just some peculiarities of a speaker and consequently aren’t distinctive. (6 cлайд)

Trubetskoy has offered the rules of distinction between a phoneme and a variant:

1) If 2 sounds occur in the same position and replace each other without changing the meaning – the optional variant of a phoneme.