Generative phonology means an approach to phonology which aims to describe the knowledge ie competence which a native speaker must have to be able to produce and understand the sound system of his/her language ( Richards et al, 1989). It came into existence in the 1920s and 1930s on the sole effort of Trubetzkoy and Jacobson, two phoneticians of Prague school of Phonology, as an outcome of their discontent on the structural rules. For which Trubetzkoy published a book in the translated form of phonology as principles of phonology in 1969 and several books and articles written by Jakobson around 1929. It was further developed by Chomsky, Halle and Fant etc. There is whole-part relationship between Generative phonology and generative grammar in which Generative grammar is the broad umbrella term and generative phonology is the rib ie a part of it. Generative phonology formulates rules to express the relationship between the output of a set of syntactic rules and the sounds of actual utterances (Ladefoged, 1971). Generative phonology emerged as a reaction against taxonomic phonology to introduce feature theories by recognising two levels of linguistic forms – ‘underlying representation’ and ‘surface representation’. It introduces explicit phonological rules and the way for the correct application of these rules, by incorporating the acoustic phonetics in phonology such as diffuse, compact, grave, acute, tense, lax etc and, by converting almost all phonological features in binary feature ie plus and minus feature etc. It follows the principle of economy in its rule formalism in phonological description and is concerned with the relationship versus actual pronunciation of sound segment. Phoneme is the smallest distinctive unit in the underlying representation of speech sound, and capable of distinguishing words of different meanings. For example, both /t/ and /d/ are phonemes in English because they are capable of making a meaning difference as in the words ‘ten’ and ‘den’ or ‘ mat’ and ‘mad’. According to Catford (1988), phonemes refer to ‘ the minimal sequential contrastive units of the phonology of language.’ Phoneme is defined variously by different scholars and it is viewed in three ways: namely i) phoneme as a phonetic reality, ii) phoneme as a phonological reality and iii) phoneme as psychological reality. The view ‘ phoneme as phonetic reality’ asserts that the sounds which belong to the same phoneme share important phonetic properties. It was proposed by Jones and was forwarded by Gleason, Bloomfield etc. In the word of Jones (1931), ‘ phoneme is a family of sounds in a given language, consisting og an important sound of the language together with other related sounds which take place in particular sound-sequences.’ In the similar vein, Gleason (1955) defines the phoneme as ‘ a class of sounds which: 1) are phonetically similar and 2) show similar characteristics patterns of distribution in the language or dialect under consideration.’ It assets that physically similar sounds are the member of the phoneme that may occur according to different phonetic environment. For example, /p/ may stand for [p], [ph], [p:], [p’], etc. The view ‘phoneme as a phonological reality’ is proposed by Prague school and defined and described by Trubetzkoy and forwarded by R. Jacobson, V. Mathesius. Trubetzkoy (1939) , founder of Prague school defines the phoneme as, ‘ the sum of the phonologically relevant properties of a sound,’ adding ‘ the phoneme can be defined satisfactorily neither on the basis of its psychological nature nor on the basis of its psychological nature nor on the basis of its relation to the phonetic variants, but purely and solely on the basis of its function in the system of language.’ In the sense that a phoneme as a minimal unit that can function to distinguish meanings. A phoneme is a bundle of distinctive sound features. For example, the phoneme /p/ is the bundle of features such as voiceless, bilabial, and stop. In the same way a phoneme is defined in terms of its contrasts within a system. For example, the /b/ phoneme in English is very different from the /b/ phoneme in Berber, since in the latter case, there is no /p/ to contrast with it. The third view regards phoneme as a psychological reality ie a sound unit at mental level. It was proposed by Badown de Courtenay, a polish linguist of Russian school and forwarded by Sapir, an American linguist. According to Courtenay, phoneme is ‘ a mental reality, as the intention of the speaker or the impression of the hearer or both.’ For example, when a speaker of American English says ‘ I miss you;, his real intention is [ ai miss ju]. So in this case, the intended sound /s/ is a phoneme, not the produced one ie [sh]. Twaddell (1993) reacts this view as ‘ such a definition is invalid because 1)‘ We have no rights to guess about the linguistic workings of inaccessible ‘mind’, and 2) ‘we can secure no advantage from such guesses. The linguistic process of the ‘mind’ as such are quite simply unobservable; and introspection is notoriously a fire in a wooden stove.’
Posted on: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 03:24:39 +0000
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