5. Methods of typological analyses.

The main method of typological studies is the comparative method. Comparative linguistics applies this method as well, but in that trend the elements compared are similar materially, which allows the scholar to establish their genetic affinity. Typology compares elements that are similar functionally. e.g. The English, Russian and Turkish languages have affixes which form nouns with the meaning "the doer of an action". These are the English affix -er, the Turkish one -ci, the Russian -тель. They consist of different phonemes and have no common origin, but they have the same function in the language. So they can be studied in comparative typology. Elements compared must have some common, similar (isomorphic) features in different languages. e.g. Different languages have their own case systems with peculiar case meanings. Isomorphic characteristics serve as a basis for typological classification. They are called typological constants. One of typological constants is existence of the category of case. Using it, we can classify all languages into two groups: the ones having a system of declension and the ones lacking it. Difference between languages may lie not only in the fact of existence/non-existence of some element, but also in the place of the element within its microsystem. When two languages are compared one of them serves as a prototype. For language students such a prototype is usually their native language. But the description of the English language by Russian-speaking students will differ considerably from the one made by French-speaking students. We can't get a really scientific, objective description in this way. A "neutral" language must be found, which can serve as a prototype for any language. Boris Andreevitch Uspenskiy suggested using isolating languages as prototypes because their structure is the simplest, and features isomorphic for all languages are explicit and distinct in them. But other scholars argue that the structure of isolating languages is not as simple as it seems, and some artificial prototype language must be constructed for the purposes of typological comparison. Typological characteristics of a language revealed with the help of comparison of this language to a prototype language are correlated. They form a system. According to Georgiy Pavlovitch MeFnikov some elements and phenomena of this system occupy the leading position in it and the speaker subconsciously chooses such language means which are in harmony with the leading tendency. This leading grammatical tendency was given the name of determinant. e.g. The Semitic languages (according to G.P. Mefnikov) have a tendency to grammaticalization. That's why verbal meaning is prevalent in word roots, consonants are used for expressing lexical meaning and vowels are used for expressing grammatical meanings. The Chinese language has a tendency to lexicalization. It doesn't express explicitly the information which is clear from the context (plurality is expressed only when not clear from the context). Differences between languages can be quantified. A quantitative method was introduced by Joseph Greenberg. It is called the method of typological indices. The most typical approach presupposes comparing languages "level by level", i.e. the phonological level of one language is compared to the phonological level of the other, then the morphological, the syntactical, the lexical levels are compared. However, similar functions can be performed by elements of different levels in different languages, e.g. I don't lend my books to anyone (phonology) Я не даю моих книг никому (vocabulary) I don't lend my books to anyone (phonology) Я не даю моих книг кому попало, (vocabulary) Вы знаете, где магазин, (phonology) You know where the shop is. (Syntax) Вы знаете, где магазин? (phonology) Do you know where the shop is?

6. Phoneme and speech sounds. Variants of phoneme. Phonology. ‘ Phonology is the study of how speech sounds are organized and how they function. Phonological analysis can determine which sound differences are significant in a language. Speech sounds tend to adjust to nearby sounds in systematic ways. Speech sounds tend to vary around a norm. The sound system of a language tends to be symmetrical. Phonological analysis is an essential part of determining how to write a language.  A new linguistic science which came into being in Russia at the end of the 19th century and was developed by Russian and foreign investigators helps us understand the essence of the sound changes and the essence of sound itself. The name of this science is phonology, which is the theory of sound functions in general and deals with the study of phonemes.  The distinction between phonetics and phonology is now generally accepted.  It was observed long ago that not all the sounds in any language have the same value. The difference lies much deeper than the difference in the acoustic pronunciation of sounds. Two people speaking the same language and pronouncing individual sounds exactly alike could hardly be found. But this diversity is not noticeable by an average observer.  Sometimes sounds differ slightly in pronunciation but this difference is quite irrelevant, in English, for instance, the /t/ of time is distinctly different from that of sting, but the difference is not important. In such English words as back and bag, the meaning is different. What makes it different? Probably the two ending sounds.  All these considerations lead us to the conclusion that in language not all sounds have equal values. Sounds must be classified according to the function they perform in the language, and from this point of view speech sounds and phonemes ought to be distinguished.  Before going into an analysis of the phoneme, it is necessary to give some historical notes on the subject.                                  History Of The Phoneme Theory   Jan Baudouin de Courtenay  The first linguist to point 9ut the distinction between the “phone” (speech-sound), Russian “zvuk”, and the “phoneme” (Russian “fonema”) was Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), the famous Russian philologist of Polish origin, who established himself in Russia, first as a privat-docent at St. Petersburg then as Professor- for eight years (1875- 1883) in Kazan, where he created his famous school of linguistics. Later he held professorships at Dorpat (1883-1893), Cracow (1893-1900) and eventually St. Petersburg (1901-1918) where he continued to develop his teaching. He spent the last years of his life inPoland.  He worked out the fundamental principle of the phoneme during the 1870’s, from 1868 to be more exact, thus forestalling Western European linguistics by nearly 40 years. Baudouin de Courtenay stated more than once that the word “phoneme” was invented by his student Kruszewsky. Baudouin de Courtenay did not, however, write on this theme, and in fact, no clear exposition of it appeared in print until 1894, when he published is Proba Teorj Alternacyj Fonelycznych. A German translation of this, Versuch einer Theorie phonetischer Alternationen, was published at Strassburg in 1895.  He proceeded from the assumption that the role of sounds in the mechanism of language, for communication between people, does not coincide with their physical nature, and that this non-coincidence makes the distinction between “phonemes” and “speech-sounds” necessary. In his theory he subordinated the phonetic side of speech to the social function of language as a means of communication. He stated not only the mutual relationships of phonemes, but also the ways in which they are formed historically.                                                             D. Jones  The well-known English phonetician D. Jones points out in his book The Phoneme: its Nature, Development and Origin that the term phoneme as used by Baudouinde Courtenay was a phonetic one. This phonetic concept can be viewed in two ways in his works—“psychologically” and “physically”. Viewed “psychologically”, a phoneme is a speech-sound pictured in one’s mind and aimed at in the process of talking. The actual concrete sound (phone) employed in any particular speech-utterance may be the pictured sound or it may be another sound having some affinity to it, its use being conditioned by some feature or features of the phonetic context. Baudouin de Courtenay recognized two kinds of phonetics: one was called  psychophonetics and related to the pictured sounds; the other was calledphysiophonetics and related to concrete sounds actually uttered.  Viewed from the “physical” point of view, a phoneme is a set of sounds uttered in a particular language which count for practical purposes as if they were one and the same; the use of each member of the set is conditioned by  the phonetic environment, i.e. no one member ever occurs in a situation reserved for another (for example, in English the /k/ sound of call neveroccurs before an /i/; nor does the /k/ sound of king ever occur before /0:/  Baudouin’s theory of the phonological distribution of phonemes is very important, especially in its relationship to the construction of phonetic transcriptions, the devising of alphabets for languages and to the practical teaching of spoken foreign languages.

         L.V. Scerba

Baudouin de Courtenay idea was developed by his immediate follower L .Scerba in 1912, in his book Russian Vowels in their Qualitative and Quantitative Aspects.

The definition of the phoneme given by Scerba as the smallest general phonetic representation of the given language which is able to associate with the meaning representation and to differentiate words was of a semantic character. In this definition L.Scerba emphasized the close connection between phoneme and meaning.

                        Phoneme

The phoneme is the smallest unit of language because it cannot be divided any smaller; but nevertheless, it is a complex phenomenon. It consists of a number of features which are not independent, but occur simultaneously in the phoneme; for example, the Russian /g/ may be considered as voiced or voiceless, soft or hard, nasal or non-nasal and so on. These distinctive features usually occur together in a bundle of sound- features of several at a time.  Some of these features are distinctive, while others are not. The use of any particular feature is conditioned by the phonetic environment or by the position of the phoneme. In Russian , for example, the \k\ of ruka ‘hand’ may occur before \a\,\o\, \u\, and at the end of a word but never before \i\, or \e\, giving us the \k’\ phoneme; this \k’\ never occurs at the end of a word.

  The same feature of a phoneme in different languages may have a different functional character: in Russian the voiced\voiceless feature is neutralized at the end of a word \prut-twig; prud- pond/, whereas in English this feature distinguishes the meanings of such words as bat and bad, hat and had.