Federico Leoni, Il fonema: realtà o illusione?
The present paper, starting from the critique to the segmental model of language and the concept of phoneme, analyzes the phonological ideas that K. B. expresses in his Sprachtheorie (1934) and other minor writings. The investigation shows how Bühler, while appreciating the idea of phoneme as proposed by the Prague school and Trubeckoj as an example of the general principle of abstraktive Relevanz, integrates the idea with a repre- sentation model of the signifier based on the gestalt principle of the Klanggesicht. There- fore, the semiotic and linguistic principle of pertinence and of distinctive capability does not display itself always and only in the traditional phonologic oppositions (typically repre- sented by minimal pairs), but can also be distributed along the entire string, analogously to what happens in the detection of faces, where the erasure of one or more features consid- ered distinctive does not prevent the correct recognition. Ultimately, the principle of gestalt recognition, seemingly anti-economical from the viewpoint of human memory ability, finds its support in the integration of the symbolic and deictic fields. Thus the recognition of phonic faces, even when phonetically underspecified, is granted from context, namely the world as lived and thought, shared by the participants in a linguistic exchange. Bühler hence proposed a powerful and versatile phonological model, capable of taking into ac- count the variability, instability and fragility of the vocal signal, opposed to that of the dou- ble articulation proposed by Martinet, shared today by all phonologies, and becoming a cli- ché.per
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