Azterketa fonologikoaren inguruko gogoetak: FONEMA

Abstract

The point of departure of this paper is the lack of a clear definition of the phoneme in nowadays phonological scholarship. It is the aim of the present study to contribute to the discussion about this and other related topics of phoneme analysis. First, a short revision of some of the main contributions to the history of the phoneme is made. It must be mentioned that the most interesting proposals concerning the definition of the phoneme are not to be found in the large trends of linguistics but in the works of often forgotten individuals such as Sapir, Ulaszyn, etc. The second part deals with the three grammatical aspects that have to be taken into account in a synchronic phoneme analysis: paradigmatics, the production model of phonological processing and the auditory processing. The third and last part stresses the importance that some kinds of variation and pragmaticaly conditioned phenomena such as historical phonology, stylistics, language acquisition and contrastive linguistics can have for the argumentation in phoneme analysis. In its turn, phoneme analysis can contribute to the study of that kind of evidence.