Is the very concept of the phoneme disputed?

Question

I believe there was some important research published in recent decades which brought a fundamental change to the way linguists think about phonemes.

Or is it that the concept of the phoneme has always been contentious despite its seeming wide acceptance to those of us who only dabble in linguistics?

I seem to recall reading that a certain linguist studied a certain language and in the end decided that how we thought of phonemes just didn't apply to this language and that we instead had to look at things another way.

Does my recollection have any truth to it? Who was the linguist and what is the groundbreaking paper or name of the competing theory?

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I know the question is pretty vague so please help me improve it. Answers telling me I'm barking up the wrong tree are absolutely fine.

Answer 1

A part of the question thusfar unattended is whether the concept of phoneme has always been contentious. It has.

The position defended in Sapir's (1925, 1933) classic papers, that the phoneme is not just a unit of analysis, but has some psychological status, has always had its critics. There are two major facets of this claim that were challenged: that mental processes of language users involved a segment-sized atomic unit, and that this segment-sized unit was a primitive, called the phoneme.

Sapir's position is challenged by Twaddell (1935: sec.2), who is suspicious of the whole enterprise of inferring mental entities. A fine quotation from that work is given here:

Such a [mentalist] definition [of the phoneme] is invalid because (1) we have no right to guess about the linguistic workings of an inaccessible 'mind', and (2) we can secure no advantage from such guesses. The linguistic processes of the 'mind' as such are quite simply unobservable; and introspection about linguistic processes is notoriously a fire in a wooden stove. Our only information about the 'mind' is derived from the behavior of the individual whom it inhabits. To interpret that behavior in terms of 'mind' is to commit the logical fallacy of 'explaining' a fact of unknown cause by giving that unknown cause a name, and then citing the named x as the cause of the fact. 'Mind' is indeed a summation of such x's, unknown causes of human behavior.

A similar criticism, this time by a British phonetician, is found in Butlin (1937), who maintains (reflecting the then popular instrumentalist philosophy of science) that the phoneme is a "convenient fiction." Abercrombie (1991: 27ff.) [whose ideas were developed much earlier than the citation date suggests] cites Butlin's paper, disputing the status of segment-sized atomic units in language.

Eventual attacks on the phoneme from the side of generative linguists are anticipated by Martinet (1949), who argues that while most phonological concepts should be regarded as fictions, it is necessary to select at least one having status in reality, so that the theory could be grounded in facts describable in the languages of other branches of science. The concept he selects as "...la seule unité pour laquelle nous postulions une existence réele..." (1949: 46) [the only unit for which we postulate actual existence] is the feature rather than the phoneme. Martinet, however, appears to favor a non-mentalist conception of the feature.

Beginning with Halle (1954), American phonologists in what would become the generative tradition started to argue that the segment has psychologically real status, but that the phoneme is epiphenomenal, its observed properties actually being due to featural processes.

A very nice historical introduction to phonology prior to the 1970's is Fischer-Jørgensen (1975).

Answer 2

"Phoneme" is a theoretical construct which probably can't go away. Especially in languages with writing, most speakers can be asked "which sound did you make here?" in a word, and provide an answer; the answer often roughly corresponds to some canonical choice of representative sound for that phoneme. I believe speakers of languages which use pictographic representations are often also able to do this; I'm not sure what the situation is like with speakers of languages without a widely accepted writing system.

"Phone," on the other hand, seems like it could be more contentious. For instance, in Uighur /o/ and /u/ are separate phonemes; if asked, speakers will readily clarify which one they used; but the actual acoustics of their articulations in context easily bleed into each other.

Answer 3

There is not much contention about the concept of a phoneme, but there are several researchers who think it is more a function of literacy than reality.

Suffice to say, we all use phonemes in discussing languages, but when you look at speech, you do not see discrete units. You see lots of variation that can be made discrete-seeming through speech processing.

Even if we were to say "phonemes do not exist as primary things" (i.e., in the same way as we can say "chairs exist"), we can still approximate the concept of a phoneme using things that do exist like pitch, intensity, formants, noise, times, etc.

Answer 4

A small addition to the above answers: I believe psycholinguistics in general is perhaps the field where the opposition to the notion of phoneme is the strongest. I once read a summary of a number of psychological studies which were supposed to prove that phonemes don't really exist in our minds and what speakers typically consider to be phonemes are in fact letters. I can't remember very well but I'm almost sure it was a paper by Robert F. Port. I can also remember seeing a few phonological theories which attempted to do away with the phoneme completely.

I don't want to evaluate all these ideas here. I think they might be indeed true but I surely can't prove it. This way or another, even despite its notorious indefinability, phoneme is a very handy concept in linguistic research and I guess most linguists use it many times each day, whether they believe in its psychological reality or not.

I certainly believe in the case you mention. There are probably many cases where it is very difficult to determine whether a certain sound is a phoneme or not, see e.g. Slavonic [y] (as in Russian ‹ы›) or Turkic [ḱ]. Nevertheless, on the whole, phoneme is a handy terminological tool and still widely used — just like we talk about nouns and verbs in English even though separating one from the other is often impossible.

Answer 5

I remember reading in a book Eskimo-Aleut languages that the author disagreed with the concept of phonemes and allophones. He said (about Greenlandic; my translation from the German):

Under certain conditions only [f x χ ɬ], under others, only [v ɣ ʁ l]. These conditions are the quantity. [Summary of the remainder of the paragraph: the former only occur long, the latter only short. -PN]

There are linguists who would not simply describe this fact and leave it at that. In a functionalistic analysis, they would combine those sounds to four units called phonemes: they would combine [f] and [v], [x] and [ɣ], [χ] and [ʁ], and [ɬ] and [l]; and one would come up with labels for the phonemes such as /f x χ ɬ/ or /v ɣ ʁ l/. The situation where one phoneme corresponds to a number of different sounds is then called allophony. The really interesting question, however, is what the point of the concept of allophony is. There are some notes on this in Holst (2001: 38, 48f.), but they are not particularly numerous.

Functionalists start from the presupposition that languages are composed of units of sound whose differences distinguish meaning. For example, the German words Paß [pas] and Baß [bas] have two separate units in their respective onsets which determine the meaning difference between the two words. There are, however, cases where differences of sound cannot make a difference in meaning, because the language system [what I would call the phonology, PN] regulates which sound appears where. For example, in German, the sound [x] only appears after back vowels and [ç] appears in other positions. This is a complementary distribution. The situation with Greenlandic [f] and [v], etc., is another example. When functionalists encounter such cases, they deny that those sounds are individual units of the respective language, say that this is a case of allophony, and combine the two (or more) sounds to a single phoneme. This course of action is, however, absurd. Afundamental trait of science is that it is empirically founded: observations are made and then conclusions are drawn. If one observes, for example, that German [x] and [ç] are in complementary distribution, then one may and should state this, but one may not reinterpret the data. The basic assumption of functionalism, which was stated at the beginning of this paragraph, is incorrect: languages are simply not composed of units of sounds, the distinctions between which always cause differences in meaning. One encounters the truth of this statement empirically again and again.

It has to be stated clearly: the concept of allophony is pure nonsense. Such combining of sounds are not legitimate in a scientific treatment of language and should therefore be refrained from.

(Jan Henrik Holst, Einführung in die eskimo-aleutischen Sprachen, Helmut Buske Verlag, Hamburg 2005. ISBN 3-87548-386-3. Pages 39f. Notes in [italics and square brackets] are mine.)

Answer 6

The one point that doesn't seem to have been mentioned is the distinction between segmental and non-segmental approaches to phonology going back at least to the 1960s. So while something phoneme-like may indeed be useful for some kinds of linguistic analysis, the psychological reality (as pointed out) or practical utility (for speech recognition, for instance), has long been in question.

Approaches such as autosegmental phonology or exemplar phonology all seem to be dancing around the same issue of phoneme being at the same time so attractive and so limiting as an analytic concept.

Answer 7

Edward Sapir's classic paper The Psychological Reality of Phonemes argues that the phoneme (as opposed to the phone, an object properly in the domain of phonetics) is necessary to understand phonological systems. More recently, probably beginning with Chomsky & Halle's The Sound Pattern of English, phonemes were `decomposed' into bundles of features that can be the target of phonological rules. From the wiki page:

Chomsky and Halle represent speech sounds as bundles of plus-or-minus valued features (e.g. vocalic, high, back, anterior, nasal, etc..) The phonological component of each lexical entry is considered to be a linear sequence of these feature bundles. A number of context-sensitive rules transform the underlying form of a sequence of words into the final phonetic form that is uttered by the speaker. These rules are allowed access to the tree structure that the syntax is said to output. This access allows rules that apply, for example, only at the end of a word, or only at the end of a noun phrase.

As far as I'm aware (though I am no phonologist), there is not much of a debate within rule-based phonology about the status of the phoneme (or, the feature bundle it `names') as a theoretical necessity. Outside of rule-based phonology, I'm not sure the issue is treated.

Answer 8

Lots of linguists have disliked phonemes.

Who was the linguist you have in mind? It could be Noam Chomsky, if you go clear back to 1964 and his paper Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Chomsky argued that phonemic theory could be characterized by certain assumptions about the relationships of allophones and phonemes, which assumptions were vulnerable to factual arguments. Defenders of phonemics naturally attacked the assumptions as not actually characterizing phonemics at all.

Generative phonologists (followers, to at least some extent, of Halle and Chomsky's theories) who had a descriptive interest in phonology have tended to use the term phoneme to mean segment of underlying phonological representation, which is probably very, very different from what a phonemicist would have understood a phoneme to be like.