Phonetics and orthoepy: Status, object and tasks of two disciplines

Abstract

It is known that two linguistic disciplines — phonetics and orthoepy — coexist on the sound level of the Russian language. The question of the relationship between the status, object and tasks of these sections as independent linguistic disciplines is debatable. In the works of modern scientists, two main approaches to the definition of phonetics and orthoepy can be found. Some linguists traditionally believe that both sections of the science of spoken speech study the same language material, but from different angles. Others attempt to differentiate the areas of responsibility of phonetics and orthoepy, showing that they operate in principle with different sound facts. The article formulates and analyzes these points of view and offers a new approach that allows not to contrast phonetics and orthoepy, but to combine them on the basis of the principle of positional structure. The implementation of a phoneme under the action of an orthoepic regularity is probabilistically predicted by a number of factors of different nature — phonetic, lexical, grammatical, word-forming, graphic and sociolinguistic, which were previously proposed to be called orthoepic positions. These factors do not operate in isolation, but there is a complex hierarchical system of relationships between them. It is possible to provide a description of the sound system of the Russian language, in which pronouncing patterns are divided not into phonetic and orthoepic, but into positional and non-positional. The concepts of phonetic and orthoepic positions can either be combined into a single concept of pronouncing positions, or, while preserving the concepts of phonetic and orthoepic positions, the former can be considered as a particular manifestation of the latter, which removes the question of differences between phonetics and orthoepy.