NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/sci/lang/9030

Text File | 1993-01-28 | 5.7 KB | 118 lines

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From: [e-mail] (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Subject: Re: what is a phoneme
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Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 00:56:59 GMT
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Christopher Brian Pound writes:
>>
>>    A phoneme is the minimal psychological construct representing
>>    certain sounds which occur in a given language.
>
>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).

You're a genius.  This hits the nail on the head.  The fact is the in some
ways we operate with a system that looks a lot like structuralists' autono-
mous phonemes.  In other ways, though, we are quite capable of operating in
ways that are more abstract, more amenable to generativists' systematic
phonemes.

The two models are not mutually exclusive.

>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)

In a recent conversation with Patricia Donegan, one of the participants
in this forum, she mentioned that it simply never occurred to some of
the mid-century structuralists that the distributional and psychological
definitions of the phoneme were different.  Generative phonologists don't
seem to show signs of taking the distinction to heart, either.

Pike was a really good mind, I believe.  IMHO.

>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 :).

If I say "bad" in my pronunciation to many of my neighbors here in Chicago,
they understand it, but repeat the word back in their own dialect.  They
don't notice anything other than a slight accent.  They immediately map the
form to a phonemic structure of some sort, and when they repeat it, they
essentially ignore the phonetic nuances of my speech.  Clearly a psychological
phoneme here.  Note, though, that when I talk about "root beer," they often
use my pronunciation, and often use theirs as well.  My mother-in-law uses
the tense o pronunciation except in the phrase "A & W Root Beer," in which
cases she uses [u].  The fact is that this dialectal difference is perceptible.
It crosses phoneme boundaries.  Given that they have no rule that maps the one
sound to the other, they simply treat the two forms of "root" as synonyms.
Sound seem to be mapping to abstracts units of some kind.

I have this crazy theory that morphology can condition only rules based on
psychological phonemes.  Subphonemic processes are never part of the grammar,
never conditioned by higher-level considerations.  I've had enough conversa-
tions with David Stampe that I suspect I've derived this notion from him
somehow.  I have some interesting data to back it up if anyone is *really*
interested.  It's not as circular as it sounds.

Or then maybe it is.

>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 ...

My experience with Semitic scripts indicates that they don't even represent
all phonemes.  What is more, when diacritics are introduced to fill in the
gaps, these diacritics do not represent systematic phonemes; nor do they
represent autononous phonemes, as discovered by traditional, distributional
methods.  What do they represent?  Let's call them psychological phonemes
for the fun of it.

Patricia Donegan has promised to send me a paper on a related topic, and I
am eager to read it.

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

So are all of us.  But at least we're admitting it.


--

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              [e-mail]
   [e-mail]          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer