THE RELATIVE FREQUENCY OF PHONEMES IN GENERAL-AMERICAN ENGLISH
THE RELATIVE FREQUENCY OF PHONEMES IN GENERAL-AMERICAN ENGLISH
复制标题
DOI：
10.1080/00437956.1950.11659381
复制
发表时间：
1950-12-01
影响因子：
0.6
通讯作者：
Hayden, Rebecca E.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hayden, Rebecca E.
1.导论.本研究的目的是分析一个具有代表性的普通美国英语样本中音素出现的相对频率。布卢姆菲尔德在《语言》一书中说：”如果我们取一个大的语音体，我们可以计算出音素和音素组合的相对频率。这项工作一直被语言学家忽视，业余爱好者也做得很不完美，他们把音素和印刷字母混为一谈。[1]里德最近阐述了这种语言分析的重要性：语音学、音位学、形态学和句法学的描述性技术通常旨在分析语言现象的性质和多样性，而不是这种现象的数量和频率。这种定性研究是成功的定量分析的先决条件，因此，目前定性语言分析的结果为定量研究提供了最好的基础。定性分析已经被追求了如此之久，如此之彻底，以至于现在语言学家将他们的注意力转向定量分析将是卓有成效的。2本研究是由作者对国外学生英语作为外语教学中面临的发音问题的兴趣而引发的：如果确定各种美式英语音素的相对出现频率，似乎可能会有一种在教学上更有效、在语言上更合理的方法来解决发音问题。进一步相信，这些数据将在言语和语言学领域的其他领域具有价值。以前的研究。据笔者所知，以往对美国英语音位的分析都没有采用定量统计的方法。以前的所有研究都属于所谓的”定量预分析”性质; 3也就是说，计算了原始总数和百分比。此外，事实上，以前的分析实际上是语音的，而不是音素的。此外，据信，没有人研究过为这项研究选择的特定类型的语音材料。(See材料和程序如下。）
1. Introduction. The purpose of this study is to analyze the relative frequency of occurrence of phonemes in a representative sample of General-American English. Bloomfield in Language has said," If we take a large body of speech, we can count out the relative frequencies of phonemes and of combinations of phonemes. This task has been neglected by linguists and very imperfectly performed by amateurs, who confuse phonemes with printed letters." 1 The importance of this type of linguistic analysis has recently been stated by Reed: Linguistic analysis... tends to be largely qualitative: the descriptive techniques of phonetics, phonemics, morphology, and syntax aim generally to analyze the nature and variety of linguistic phenomena rather than the magnitude and frequency of such phenomena.... Qualitative study of this sort is a prerequisite to successful quantitative analysis, so that the present results of qualitative linguistic analysis furnish the best basis upon which quantitative study may rest.... Qualitative analysis has been pursued for so long and with such thoroughness that it will now be fruitful for linguists to tum some of their attention to quantitative analysis. 2 The present study was prompted by the writer's interest in problems of pronunciation faced in the teaching of English as a foreign language to students from abroad: It seemed that there might be a pedagogically more efficient and linguistically sounder approach to pronunciation problems if the relative frequency of occurrence of the various American English phonemes were determined. It is further believed that the data will be of value in other areas of the speech and linguistics fields.2. Previous studies. To this writer's knowledge, previous analyses of the phonemes of American English have not been made with a quantitative statistical approach. All of the previous studies have been in the nature of what has been called" quantitative pre-analyses;" 3 that is, raw totals have been counted and percentages calculated. Also, as a matter of fact, the previous analyses have actually been phonetic rather than phonemic. Furthermore, it is believed that there has been no study of the particular sort of speech material selected for this study.(See Materials and Procedures below.)