Lecture 2 phonological theories I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay’s Theory of Phonology

луг - лук, пруд - прут. In such cases archiphonemes /p/b and t/d/ may appear in Russian.

Phonemes and their distinctive features differ. A phoneme is a sum of distinctive features. Distinctive sounds, i.e. phonemes and distinctive features are considered to be two levels of the phonological structure of a language. The level of distinctive features is called «merismatic level». One of the fundamental notions of phonology is that of position, which creates conditions for the realization of phonemes in speech. Positions may depend not only on the phonetic context but also on the morphological conditions. For example, in joining basic and affixal morphemes some sound combinations become an affricative: