Natural Phonology and the Teaching of Pronunciation

Abstract

It is fair to say that the theoretical underpinnings for all pedagogical treatments of Russian pronunciation, whenever there are any such underpinnings, are drawn from one of two theories of phonology. These are Taxonomic Phonology and Generative Phonology.' In the teaching of Russian pronunciation use is made, whether implicitly or explicitly, of Contrastive Analysis, which is also performed within either the taxonomic or the generative framework. The burden of this paper is that neither taxonomic nor generative phonology is a satisfactory basis for contrastive analysis or for teaching Russian pronunciation, and that a third theory of phonology, increasingly known as Natural Phonology, is able to overcome their inadequacies. In taxonomic phonology the separately autonomous morphemic and phonemic levels are mediated by morphophonemic rules, and rules of allophonic distribution relate phonemic representations to phonetic ones. Thus,