NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/sci/lang/9026

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From: [e-mail] (Christopher Brian Pound)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: what is a phoneme
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 27 Jan 93 21:37:44 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (News)
Organization: Rice University
Lines: 127

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes:
>> What is a phoneme?
>
>    A phoneme is the minimal psychological construct representing
>    certain sounds which occur in a given language.
>
>Attack if you dare; I'm spoiling for a fight.

Hey, yeah, a fight over the phoneme!  It happened in the 30s!  It happened in
the 60s!  Now, it's the 90s, and we're well overdue for a good brawl over
mentalism in phonology.  :)

> stupid attempts to locate phonemes out there in actual speech, as the
> structuralists before Chomsky tried to do.

If, by "locate phonemes ... in actual speech," you mean denying the mental
reality of phonemes, you're not reading the same structuralists I am!

Actually, Kenneth Pike's perspective turns out to be pretty interesting,
because he contradicts himself:

"The sounds of a language are automatically and unconsciously organized by
the native into structural units, which we call PHONEMES." (Pike, 57)

It seems clear that the sounds of a language *are* automatically and
unconsciously organized by the native, but I don't think I've ever understood
the Aristotelian mania that drives the search for absolutely distinct
"structural units."  Sometimes that makes sense, and sometimes it don't.
You can't expect everything to fit (cf. Feyerabend, _Against Method_).
What's important here is that Pike definitely believes in the psychological
reality of phonemes; he doesn't think of them as things that *only* exist
as linguistic models (and neither do I).

Intriguingly, Pike seems to reverse himself:

"a PHONEME is one of the significant units of sound arrived at for a
particular language by the analytical procedures developed from the basic
premises previously presented." (Pike, 63; this whole quote was originally
underlined)

Fabulous, Ken!  Phonemes are artifacts of linguistic methodology!  Good call;
there's definitely something to this.  But then again, what about that
"Psychological Reality of the Phoneme" stuff?  That's easy to explain;
the organization of the sounds of a language *is* psychologically
real, and Pike's methodology usually tells us how to predict that
organization.  OK, no problem then.  A phoneme is a conceptual by-product
of a linguistic methodology founded on abstract objectivism; it is used to
categorize the sounds of a language in a manner that is, hopefully, congruent
with the way a native categorizes sounds psychologically.

The interesting question is probably, when and why does the phoneme fail?
Pike mentions the "under-differentiation" and "over-differentiation" of
phonemes, along with the "neutralization of oppositions" as special cases, and
he introduces the "ARCHIPHONEME: A special type of phoneme of limited
distribution, postulated to account for under-differentiation of phonemes"
(Pike, 233).  The 'archiphoneme' seems strongly reminiscent of the 'epicycle,'
don't you think?  I guess the mind is a strange place -- one where things
just don't always break down into minimal units (contra Connolly :).

Anyway, now we have an idea about when the phoneme fails (or needs serious
emendation), but what would be really special is to know why.  I've heard
rumors that we're stuck on phonemes as a by-product of alphabetic literacy,
and I've already mentioned the Aristotelian drive to categorize absolutely.
Bakhtin's explanation is much more interesting: "The desire to see language
as a static synchronic system, according to Bakthin, was symptomatic of a
kind of linguistic necrophilia, a nostalgia for deceased languages, whose
systems could be fixed precisely _because_ they were dead.  The fundamental
categories of Saussurean linguistics, which are phonetic (units of sound)
and morphological (units of sense) ultimately derive, he argued, from the
categories of Indo-European comparative linguistics, precisely those
categories most appropriate to a dead or alien [?] language.  Saussure belongs
to a tradition of reflexion on language which Bakhtin labels ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVISM, i.e. a view of language which strives to reduce its constantly
changing heterogeneities into a stable system of normative forms" (Stam,
et al., 13).  In doing this, Saussure is "an heir to the tradition of
Descartes, Leibniz, and Condillac" (ibid.).

Personally, I'd say that was a pretty serious insult.

Pike, not to mention the many other theorists of the phoneme, is clearly
subject to Bakhtin's criticism.  Some of the "subpremises" he founds his
theory on are particularly telling: "(1) A phonemic orthography is the
easiest one for the native to learn to read and write ... (4) There is only
one accurate phonemic analysis for a specific set of data ... (12) Fluctuation
can occur between full phonemes ... (14) Every language has consonants and
vowels ... (15) Certain kinds of segments may be vowels in one language but
consonants in another, and vice versa ... (21) Occasionally a single segment
may constitute a consonant and a vowel simultaneously" (Pike, 62).  From these,
we can infer that writing is very high on Pike's agenda, that ambiguity won't
be tolerated (*despite* "fluctuation"), and that traditional phonological
categories (inherited from Dionysius Thrax, ~100 B.C.!) are to remain
unchallenged, even if there is some confusion about them.

Deriving the fallibility of the phoneme from the inflexibility of writing is
no huge chore, at this point.  Linguistic categories are obviously subject to
the tyranny of the letter.  Comparative linguistics began as a study of
written language, after all (I'm thinking mainly of Franz Bopp), and Pike's
whole project is described as an attempt to reconcile speech with
writing ("to lead the student to arrive at an [written!] analysis which
parallels the vague or explicit observable reactions of speakers to their
own sounds" (Pike, 64; again, all underlined)).  If such a reconciliation
should prove to be fundamentally flawed, I guess I wouldn't be surprised.

So, in summary, I agree that sound patterns *are* organized mentally;
however, that organization is *not* minimally constructed, as Connolly
would say.  Rather, it has a socially, historically, and idiosyncratically
constructed dynamism to it.  This is not exactly ...

> how speakers conceptualize sounds

because I'm afraid I agree with Pike in locating these sound patterns in
the unconscious.  Anyway, I'd say the desire for phonemic minimalism results
simply from linguistics' positivist, superliterate heritage.

[Disclaimer: I'm only guessing. :) ]

--
References:

Pike, Kenneth L., _Phonemics: A Technique for Reducing Languages to Writing_.

Stam, Robert, et al., _New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics_.
--
Christopher Pound    +    "Homer deserves to be thrown out of the
Anthro Grad Student    +     contests and flogged."
[e-mail]    +                           -- Heraclitus