Introduction

The Dialectical Unity of the Oral and Written Forms of English.

Their Interrelationship. Feature Level vs. Semantic Level.

The Segmental and Suprasegmental Approaches

It is a well-known fact that a language with a long historical and literary tradition (for instance, Russian or English) exists in its two main forms: the written and the oral ones. There came a time when people had to find a way of communicating with each other which would be much more refined and versatile than simple gestures in ordinary situations. That was how human lan­guage originated.

Gradually the sounds people used became more clearly dis­tinguished from each other, and what we usually call oral speech came into being. Later people had to find a way of communi­cating at a distance, as well as from generation to generation. Therefore, systems of writing were worked out and then further improved. That is how things are in all modern societies in so far as their oral and written forms of speech are concerned.

These two forms of speech are so closely connected that their relationship is best described as a “dialectical unity”: it is not a question of a simple one-to-one correspondence, evolution of each proceeding as a constant and well-established interaction. Like everything else, these two forms change and develop in­dependently (within certain limits) of each other. However, the

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constant interaction, the indissoluble connection between the two results in the changes not only being speeded up but also made more interesting and effective.

It should be specially mentioned here that the relationship between oral and written English is very complex and involved, because as time goes on, every literary, well-developed, cultured language becomes a means of communication for ever greater masses of people, often separated from each other both territori­ally and socially. Therefore, it tends to break up into a number of different varieties and dialects. Nevertheless, the literary form of the language remains as the generally recognized standard, and is unceasingly elaborated and worked on. It is regarded by all educated people as the target of all their literary efforts.

Here a very important problem is bound to arise: do we speak of the two forms of language — the written and the oral ones, or do we speak of the two forms of speech? It is clear from what has just been said that human language exists only in speech and through speech and knows no other form (or mode) of exist­ence. All the different kinds of speech that are daily produced and reproduced are the basis of a notion that should be scientifi­cally grounded — the term “language”. We have already said that language exists in and through speech, like the general in the particular. A language is always an abstraction. It is something that can be discovered in and through speech and presented in a generalized overall form. It follows that language in general is not something that can be directly apprehended by one’s senses; it be­longs to the level of scientific abstraction. To describe something as the English language means to raise something to the “emic” level, which does not lend itself to direct observation. Therefore, in the present manual we are going to concern ourselves only with speech, oral and written.

Homo sapiens is distinguished from all the rest of the animal world, because he can regularly produce articulated speech. But, as has already been said above, sooner or later he is not satisfied with direct, face-to-face interaction with other human beings. Hence, the second form of human speech, the written one. This means that speech sounds are directly comparable with letters as their would-be written equivalents. Both sounds and letters are described

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as “unilateral”, because in contrast with words and sentences they do not refer to something that is outside the linguistic system. They are used to distinguish between the units of the higher (the so-called “semantic”) level, which are bilateral, that is to say, they have got both a certain form and a certain meaning. In speechol-ogy it becomes most important to understand the difference be­tween what may be called the feature level (дифференциальный уровень) and the semantic level (семантический ypoвень). When we study speech on the feature level, we concern ourselves with sounds and letters which are used to differentiate, or distinguish words and morphemes from each other. When we turn to the se­mantic level, we study its elements from the point of view of their content: if it is a word — its meaning; if it is a sentence — its purport (содержание-намерение). We concentrate on what it is words of sentences are used to get across to other people.

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The present manual is devoted entirely to the feature level of English, which means that it concerns itself with the way sounds are produced, the way letters and orthographies have been devised for the purposes expounded above.¹ The specific and extremely complex problems of the semantic (let alone metasemiotic) level are clearly outside its scope.

That is why we began by explaining what is meant by the fea­ture level of English. The feature level, in its turn, is subdivided into two sub-levels, as it were, — segmental and suprasegmental. The segmental level comprises the sounds and letters of English, which follow each other in speech in immediate succession; the suprasegmental level deals with the phenomena of sound and writ­ten symbolization which spread over successions of segmental ele­ments. Although the two are as a rule distinguished for didactic purposes, in actual fact it is very difficult to keep them apart.

To clarify our point, let us turn to the following example:

I saw a ship that sailed the sea, It left us as the sun went down. The white birds flew and followed it To town, to London town.

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Right sad were we to stand alone, And see it sail so far away. And yet we knew some ship would come, Some other ship, some other day.

In this poem no one can fail to see a succession of letters, but to this day very few people can clearly distinguish between those sequences of letters which are enunciated in speech, which are turned into sound, according to the orthographic system of the language, and those which are exceptions and do not follow the basic rules (see p. 34—37 below).

What are the letters in this short passage which do not con­form to the orthographic rules? As can be seen by comparing this short text with what we find on р. 81—89, all the letters and digraphs in it are used strictly in accordance with the or­thographic system. When we speak of the dialectical unity of the oral and written forms of speech what we mean is the extreme complexity of the relationship between the two. We can hardly find one language where one letter would always correspond to just one sound. The concept of digraphs and sometimes even of “plurigraphs” is part and parcel of the study of the feature level. One cannot study the feature level unless one understands how complex the relationship between sounds and letters is.²

When we said that the example should clarify what we have been speaking about, what we meant was just this: the dialectical unity of sounds and letters in the sense that they both belong to the feature level. They are both unilateral and serve to distinguish words and morphemes. But, unfortunately, the relationship is not a simple one-to-one correspondence. As we have said above, both systems are in a flux, in the state of constant change. There is a certain amount of independent development in each system, but they would not serve their purpose if the independence of the changes were absolute, and their interrelation relative. It is exactly the other way round: the independence is relative, while the mutual interdependence is absolute.

The same text can be used to give the reader an idea of how and when the suprasegmental analysis of the text comes in. In this case, there are all the established means of what is usu-8

ally described as “vertical segmentation” (see chapter 2, part II, pp. 44—55), i.e. different parts of the sentence or parts of the text are easily singled out. This being a poem, there is first and fore­most, the sign of the end of line which delimits a line of verse, making it “recognizable to the ear as such”,³ as the basic metrical unit of verse. Indeed, all the lines in this poem are very clearly marked off by means of a certain punctuation mark (a comma or a full stop), and there is only one instance of the so-called “run-on” line: “The white birds flew and followed it To town, to London town”.

Punctuation marks here also signal all the necessary changes of tempo, tone, pausation, which are all discussed in detail in the second part of this manual (pр. 44—55).

Chapter 1.

THE ENGLISH ARTICULATION BASIS