The Phoneme Theory

The Phoneme Theory

Ferdinand De Saussure is remembered for laying the foundations of a different approach to language studies. Linguists before him believed that language is speech and there is no distinction between the two. Therefore linguistics is the study of speech. Saussure stressed that language is a system of signs which are arranged into structures of different levels according to some rules. The signs and the rules determining the acceptability of these structures exist in the collective psyche of a language community. No member of the community has a comprehensive knowledge of the system. But all of them have enough knowledge of it to enable them to use the language for their daily needs.

Traditional linguists also asserted that words are the minimal units of language. Saussure rejected this belief. He postulated that the minimal units of language are the phonemes and the minimal semantic ad grammatical units are the morphemes. Saussure’s views about the place of phonemes in a language and the rules according to which they combine with one another are known as his theory of the phoneme.

As stated above, according to Saussure, the minimal units of language are the phonemes. Human speech organs are capable of articulating a very large number of speech sounds. Every language selects a small finite set of these sounds (consonants and vowels) for its use. These sounds are called the phonemes of the language which uses them. The phonemes themselves do not have any semantic significance. But they organise themselves according to a set of rules specific to every language into larger grammatical and meaningful units (morphemes and words).

The rules according to which they organise themselves can be divided into two complementary types – syntagmatic and paradigmatic.

The syntagmatic rules specify how they arrange themselves linearly from left to right. They tell us which of them can precede or succeed which other ones in syllables to create meaningful structures like morphemes and words. They also tell us what limitations they are subject to while forming such combinations. 

They tell us, for example, that in English, the phonemes /str/, /skr/ and /spr/ can follow one another in that order in a syllable initial cluster but /sgr/, /sbr/ and /sdr/ cannot do so, that /h/ cannot occur word finally and ŋ cannot occur word initially in English. 

Syntagmatic arrangement enables them to create combinations that carry meaning grammatically important. 

Paradigmatic rules specify which of them can be substituted for one another in a given slot. All the members of a paradigmatic group are eligible to occupy a given slot in a structure. But when they do so, they change the structure into a different structure having a different meaning. They tell us that /b, p, k, m, n, v, h/ etc. can replace one another in a set of words like bat, pat, cat, mat, gnat, vat and hat but /j/ cannot.     

There are also rules regarding how the plural morpheme s or es and the past tense and past participle morpheme d or ed in regular verbs of English would be realised in speech when they follow a certain phoneme.

We also have rules regarding which syllable an intervocalic consonant will form a part of in a polysyllabic word. They also specify which ones from a sequence of consonants in an intervocalic position will be combined with the vowel preceding them and which will be combined with the vowel succeeding them by specifying which initial and final consonant clusters are permissible in English.

Some of Saussure’s assertions have been challenged by later linguists.  Some of them have contended that phonemes are not the minimal units of language. They are themselves bundles of some distinctive phonetic features. These features which distinguish the phonemes from one another are the minimal units.

In conclusion, we can say that phonemes are units of pronunciation in a language. A phoneme is a set of sounds (allophones) that are phonetically different from one another but function as if they were the same. Often the differences are due to co-articulation – the influence of an adjacent (neighbouring) sound on the action of the vocal organs. Speakers of the language are generally not aware of the differences until they are pointed out to them. For example, the shapes assumed by the lips while articulating consonants followed by round vowels on the one hand and by neutral and spread vowels on the other or by front and back vowels are quite different. Compare the shape of the lips in words like soon and seen or the position of the tongue for hard and head. But the speakers are rarely aware of them.

In spite of the controversies which some later linguists have raised regarding Saussure’s assertions, his great contribution to the discipline of linguistics cannot be denied.