THEORY OF THE PHONEME IN THE RUSSIAN LINGUISTIC TRADITION

Natalia Kuznetsova
Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
nkuzn@yandex.ru

Keywords: cognitive phonology, functionalism, theory of phoneme, sign systems, Russian linguistics

The concept of the phoneme was born inside the Russian-speaking linguistic tradition (Baudouin de
Courtenay, Kruszewski, Scherba) and was directly related to the neurological science of the time.
Baudouin de Courtenay defined the phoneme as a “homogenous, linguistically indivisible anthropophonic
impression, emerging in the soul by the psychic merge of the impressions from pronunciations of the
same sound” (1899: 355). Moreover, the word “psychic” appears to be used as synonymous to “cerebral”
and “central nervous” in his writings (ibid.: 196, 354). His views were based on the contemporary
revolutionary ideas by Sechenov that the central nervous system keeps the traces of the previous
impressions. The more the impression is reiterated, the clearer the trace becomes and the longer it is kept
by the nervous system (1866: 62). These ideas sound very modern and can be traced in contemporary
works in the framework of functional (cognitive, usage-based) phonology (viz. Bybee 2001: 33, 52,
Langacker 2008: 220). Later, the Russian phonology was divided into the so-called Scherba’s school (which
followed these original anthropocentric ideas) and the more lingvocentric Moscow and Prague schools.
Modern conceptions within the Scherba’s school will be discussed in the paper. They are based
both on the functional theoretical ideas and the ongoing experimental research in psycholinguistics,
speech production and perception. For example, on the question of whether phonemes are basic
operational mental categories (cf. Nathan 2006: 189), it is believed that “the codes of mostly
supraphonemic levels are used” in speech perception, a phonemic string being a collateral product of
speech recognition. However, the phonemic code remains available, otherwise both the language system
and the perceptive mechanism would be deprived of openness (Zinder and Kasevič 1989: 36-37). In
speech production and perception, both top-down and bottom-up analyses (from phonemes to
morphological units and the reverse) are therefore used according to the needs.
As for the nature of the phoneme, a coherent application of the phenomenological method,
essential for cognitive linguistics (Langacker 2008: 31), brings Kuznetsova (2014) to the conclusion that
phonemes are no less abstract symbolic units than other kinds of language signs. In the original semiotic
conception by de Saussure the “signifiant”, an acoustic image of the word, was also an “entirely psychic”
rather than physical phenomenon (1919: 29). For the phoneme, one can further distinguish the functional
dimensions similar to those of other language signs: “semantics” (a structure of the mental acoustic
image), “syntax” (rules of distribution with other units of the same phonemic system under various
conditions set by phonotactics, word prosody, morphology), and “pragmatics” (interfaces with any other
entities outside the phonemic system in question, e.g. morphological units as wholes, graphic and
orthographic correlates, phonemes of earlier diachronic stages or different regional variants of the same
language, physiological restrictions on language production and perception). The whole set of criteria
structured along these three dimensions allows to give an accurate description in fine functional details for
any phoneme.

References

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