all them have described it in the same way. The majority of them agree them the phoneme serves to distinguish morphemes and words thus being a functional unit. However, some of them define it in purely “psychological” terms, others prefer physically grounded definitions. Some scholars take into consideration only the abstract aspect of the phoneme, others stick phonology some of which be discussed below. Views of the phoneme seem to fall into main classes.
The “mentalistic” or “psychological” view regards the phoneme as an ideal “mental image” or a target at which the speaker aims. He deviates from this ideal sound partly because an identical repetition of a sound is next to impossible and partly because of the influence exerted by neighbouring sounds. Acoording to this conception allophones of the phoneme are varying materializations of it. This view was originated by the founder of the phoneme theory, the Russian lingust I.A. Baudauin de Courtenay (6) and something like it appears to have been adopted by E.D. Sapir. The same point of view was shared by other linguists, Alf. (76) for one, who described phonemes as “models which speakers seek to reproduce”.
The “psychological”, or “mentalistic” view of the phoneme was brought back into favour by generative phonology, and the idea of the phoneme as a “target” has recently been revived, albeit under different terminology by M. Tatham (77).
It is definitely not possible to establish such ideal sounds which do not exist in reality. For this reason the American linguist L. Bloomfield (46) and his followers rejected the view and the English phonetician D. Jones (64), while basically favourable to the view preferred in practice to take a "physical" view. This approach to the phoneme as a clearly idealistic one cannot be taken up by Soviet linguists.
The so-called "functional" view regards the phoneme as the minisound unit by which meanings may be differentiated without much regard to actually pronounced speech sounds. Meaning differentiation is taken to be a defining chaiacteristic of phonemes. Thus the absence of palatalization in [?] and palatalization of [?] in English do not differentimeanings, and therefore [?] and [?] cannot be assigned to different phonemes but both form allophones of the phoneme [?]. The same articulatory features of the Russian [л] and [л/] do differentiate meanings, and hence [л] and [л'] must be assigned to different phonemes in Ruscf. мол – моль, лог - лёг. According to this conception the phoneme is not a family of sounds, since in eveiy sound only a certain number of the articulatory features, that is those which form the in-variant of the phoneme, are involved in the differentiation of meanings. It is the so-called distinctive features of the sound which make up the phoneme corresponding to it. For example, every sound of the English word ladder includes the phonetic feature of lenisness but this feature is distinctive only in the third sound [d], its absence here would give rise to a different word latter, whereas if any other sound becomes fortis the result is merely a peculiar version of ladder. The distinctive-ness of such a feature thus depends on the contrast between it and other possible features belonging to the same set, that is the state of the vocal cords. Thus when the above-mentioned features are distince, lenisness contrasts with fortisness. Some approaches have taken these oppositions as the basic elements of phonological structure rather than the phonemes in the way the phoneme was defined above. The functional approach extracts non-distinctive features from the phonemes thus divorcing the phoneme from actually pronounced speech sounds. This view is shared by many foreign linguists: see in particular the works of N. Trubetskoy (34), L. Bloomfield (46), R. Jakobson (62), M. Halle (62).
The functional view of the phoneme gave rise to a branch of lin-guistics called "phonology" or "phonemics" which is concerned with relationships between contrasting sounds in a language. Its special interlies in establishing the system of distinctive features of the language concerned. Phonetics is limited in this case with the precise description of acoustic and physiological aspects of physical sounds without any concern to their linguistic function. The supporters of this conception even recommend to extract phonetics from linguistic disciplines which certainly cannot be accepted by Soviet phoneticians.
A stronger form of the "functional" approach is advocated in the so-called "abstract" view of the phoneme, which regards phonemes as essentially independent of the acoustic and physiological properties assowith them, that is of speech sounds. This view of the phoneme was pioneered by L. Hjelmslev and his associates in the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle, H.J. Uldall and K. Togby.
The views of the phoneme discussed above can be qualified as ide-alistic since all of them regard the phoneme as an abstract conception existing in the mind but not in the reality, that is in human speech, speech sounds being only phonetic manifestations of these conceptions.
The "physical" view regards