Abstract
Until recently, most students of language regarded the phonic side of human speech as a meaningless jumble of acoustic and motor phenomena in which occasionally, though only by accident, the appearance of a certain order and regularity flashed into momentary view. While an opinion of this sort held the field, scientific investigation of the phonic aspects of human speech was obviously only possible using physical or physiological methods, at best, the methods of perception psychology, a situation which created a methodological gulf between phonetics and the other branches of linguistic studies. This state of affairs was changed at once as soon as it was logically inferred, from the long-accepted fact that speech sounds have a distinctive function and significatory value, that it was precisely these significatory values which represented the most significant element in linguistics, an element which of all others needed to be subjected to scientific study, since the world of these values lying behind the empirical sounds of human speech was seen to constitute an orderly system comparable, because of its fundamentally regular structure, with the system of grammatical values. For this reason no real gulf could continue to exist between phonology, as seen under this aspect, and grammar. The study of speech sounds, henceforth in the form of “phonology”, thus became a branch of linguistics, open to investigation by the same methods of linguistic research as were applied in the other branches of the subject.1
Chapter PDF
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Reference
“Phonetics” i.e. the physical and physiological investigation of the material side of speech sounds without reference to their linguistic function, is not rendered redundant by this, but merely given its proper place in the scientific family, to wit, in the field of natural sciences quite separate from language studies. The relationship of phonology to phonetics has been sufficiently clarified in a whole series of essays and lectures. Cf. V. Mathesius, “Ziele und Aufgaben der vergleichenden Phonologie”, Xenia Pragensia 1929, p. 432 ff., Karl Bühler, “Phonetik und Phonologie”, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, IV, p. 22ff., “Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaft”, Kant Studien vol. XXXVII, cf. also the same author’s “Sprachtheorie, die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache” (Jena 1934) p. 3, 14, 17, 29, 40, 42 ff, 58, 225, 273, 279ft, and the present author in Actes du Deuxième Congrès International de Linguistes, Geneva pp. 54 sqq. and “La phonologie actuelle”, Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, XXX, pp. 227 sqq.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1968 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Trubetzkoy, N.S. (1968). Prefatory Remarks. In: Introduction to the Principles of Phonological Descriptions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9228-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9228-6_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-011-8497-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-9228-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive