The London Phonological School - Реферат

Theme: The London Phonological School PLAN 1. The London Phonological School 2. The “phonemic” period, 3. London School of Linguistics 4. Sweet Henry English philologist and phonetician 5. Early Linguistics 6. Modern linguistics 1. The London Phonological School There is long tradition of phonetic and phonological studies in England. One of the first linguists who made a serious study in English phonetics was Henry Sweet. He distinguished broad and narrow trans-in his Handbook of Phonetics» (Oxford, 1877). Under “The London Phonological School” we mean the theory and methods of phonetic and phonological analysis proposed by the British linguists. This school is represented by J. R. Firth, Daniel Jones, D.Abercrombie, I. Ward, L. Armstrong, D. B. Fry, H. Kingdon, J. D. O’Connor, A. C. Gimson .The British linguists presented original ideas on phonemic and prosodic analysis. Well- know British linguists D. Jones and J. R. Firth gave brief explanations of the phoneme concept. D. Jones admits the fact that the idea of the phoneme was first introduced to him by Leningrad professor L. V. Shcherba in 1911, but both the theory and the term itself had existed for more than thirty years even then. D. Jones wrote: “According to J. R. Firth the term “phoneme” was invented as distinct from “phone” in 1879by Krushevsky”. Thus, both outstanding English linguists were familiar with the theory and term “phoneme” used by Russian linguists. The “prephoneme” period, I.e. when there was no distinction between “speech sound” and “phoneme” until 1870. 2. The “phonemic” period The “phonemic” period, which began in 1870 and includes the twentieth century. In this period the basic phonemes as functional units of the language was recognized. The first linguist to point out this distinction was I.A.Baudouin de Courtenay (1845 -1929), an outstanding Russian and Polish scholar. I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay defined the phoneme as the “psychological” equivalent of the speech sound». But he was aware of the fact that acoustic and motor i mages of the speech sound do not correspond to each other .I.A.Baudouin de Courtenay also tried to analyse phonemes on the bases of phonetic alternations in morphemes. Besides psychological and morphological definitions of the phoneme, he could considered that words may be realized in notions. I.A.Baudouin de Courtenay repeatedly stated that semantically the utterance breaks up into sentences, into significative words, words into morphological components or morphemes and morphemes into phonemes. As a morpheme is only divided into divided into components of the same nature as itself: these components -phonemes must also be significative. 3. London School of Linguistics London School of Linguistics or the London school of structuralism, a trend in contemporary structural linguistics (J. R. Firth, W. Sidney Allen, R. H. Robins, and M. A. K. Halliday). The London school of linguistics is involved with the study of language on the descriptive plane (synchrony), the distinguishing of structural (syntagmatics) and systemic (paradigmatics) concepts, and the social aspects of language. In the forefront is semantics. The school’s primary contribution to linguistics has been the situational theory of meaning in semantics (the dependence of the meaning of a linguistic unit on its use in a standard context by a definite person; functional variations in speech are distinguished on the basis of typical contexts) and the prosodic analysis in phonology (the consideration of the phenomena accruing to a sound: the number and nature of syllables, the character of sound sequences, morpheme boundaries, stress, and so on).