Lecture 1 Phonetics as a Linguistic Science Plan

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. His other definition of the phoneme as a minimal unit of the phonetic feature is purely a phonetic one. He sometimes mixed up the notions of a "speech sound" and a "phoneme". His idea on the primary and secondary phonemes was very important in the further classification of segmental and suprasegmental phonemes. He also gave descriptions of the phoneme combinations in initial, medial and final positions of the words.

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, in the sense that the substitution of one for another in the same context does not change its syntactic or semantic function, i.e. makes no change in its meaning. This theory defines a phoneme on the basis of the distributional method. Usually the phoneme is defined as the repsentative of phones in free variation or complementary distribution, which are phonetically similar. The allophones of phonemes may also be determined on the basis of the distributional method. Some representatives of this trend define a phoneme as a sum of distinctive features. They state the physical and functional aspects of the phoneme from the centralistic point of view, as their theory is based on the stimulus-response segments that are the same or different.